About

Joe was born in Nyack, New York, He was part of the New York Art Students League, went to Syracuse University on a baseball scholarship for a year and later attended Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO, to study history where he became interested in pursuing art and earned a BA, and later he attended Northern Illinois University for his MA in Fine Art. Joe was a longtime dedicated teacher and gallery director at South Suburban College for over forty years, as well as the Chairman of the Arts Dept. Joe was a tireless supporter of the arts who served on numerous arts panels and selection committees and was inspirational in many student’s and professional’s lives. He resided in Crete, IL where he worked from his home studio until 2016.

Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Jazz, African Art, the smell of burning metal, camel cigarettes, and coffee, Joe was “Old School” in so many ways. He epitomized the artist as maker, using the sweet poetry of his welded steel sculpture’s two-dimensional line & mass in the service of framing space in the tradition of David Smith, Franz Klein, Jacques Lipchitz, Arshile Gorky, and others. His work flies in the face of the flattening elements of Pop Art & Minimalism, transcending stylistic impulses into the realm of the true passion of the sculptor for the framing of the real space of his world.