Joel grew up in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood of the Bronx. His lovea affair with nature began in earnest in 1980, when he and Kate bought a lakeside camp in Dutchess County, New York, and turned it into a week-end retreat and studio.
Self-taught American sculptor William Edmondson (1882–1951) was the first
African-American artist to receive a solo
show at the Museum of Modern Art (1937).
top, left to right: Empress of the blues,
Bessie Smith; King Oliver, pioneering
New Orleans trumpeter and band leader; bottom, left to right: Duke Ellington;
King of Swing Benny Goodman; Lady
Day, Billie Holiday; Count Basie.
entering from top right: Bill Powell and Myrna Loy, stars of the “Thin Man” films of the 1940s, with their dog Asta. preceding them: Josephine Baker and her pet cheetah, Chiquita; Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt with their dog Fala; Frida Kahlo and her monkeys; Merlin with his owl, Archimedes; The Lone Ranger and Silver; St. Francis with birds. exiting the frame: Judy Garland and Toto.
Manny and Beatrice Kopp, Joel’s parents.
Portrait of Kate’s parents,
Rosemary and Bill O’Connell.
Joel’s first painting.
After a snowstorm blanketed the Bronx when Joel was eight, he and some friends shoveled the sidewalk in front of their apartment. The other boys soon lost
interest, but Joel kept at it until he had cleared the entire block. When he finished,
a butcher named Menasha Kiner emerged from his shop and gave Joel a dime. The Polish immigrant then looked down the street, asking, “Did you do all this?” When Joel said he had, Kiner shrugged into a heavy Old World fur coat and led Joel into each of the shops whose sidewalks Joel had dug out, negotiating payment from the proprietors.
Joel and Freddy, his cousin, in Joel’s
Bronx living room during World War II.
