JoeSam.
JoeSam. (b. 1938, Harlem, NY—d. 2024, Hartford, CT) a contemporary mixed media painter and installation artist. His colorful compositions contain found materials from the streets of California. Joesam. juxtaposes discarded elements such as bicycle wheels, cigarettes, plastic pipes and wooden blocks with archival images, news clippings, and discordant colors in large capital letters that are strewn across the canvas. These elements combined provide context clues to the messages he wishes to convey, such as political commentary on the continuous state of affairs in the Black community. Incited by the Jonestown Massacre of 1978 to the Rodney King beating by the LAPD in Charleston, JoeSam. has referenced these events without calling the trauma or bloodshed to our collective memory.
JoeSam.'s recent solo exhibition at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco titled, JoeSam. Text Messages, showcased his signature style and mastery of assemblage. The works featured in this exhibition Survivor and Black Country/Tuckahoe bring together a nonlinear cloud of associations pertaining to the state of Black consciousness in contemporary America. Survivor is chiefly concerned with the Charleston church shooting, where white supremacist Dylann Roof attacked the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest black church in the Southern United States, founded in 1816. JoeSam.'s piece commemorates the nine victims as one wounded survivor, the number "nine" invoked throughout the piece along with the names of those individuals, and one survivor leaning against them at the bottom of the composition. Black Country/Tuckahoe foregrounds the text "Handle with care, fragile country" or perhaps "fragile Black country" among a mass of imagery, including diverse associations like musical instruments, American and Confederate flags, various bottles and labels for alcohol, fragments and whole photographs, and various other icons and objects interwoven across the surface. The collective impression considers violence, bodies, and products, though JoeSam. masterfully complicates any singular rhetorical read, allowing the viewer to approach the content from a variety of perspectives.
In 1976, committed to youth education and empowerment, JoeSam. was hired as director of the Head Start program for the City of San Francisco, California. In 1985 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and retired from education to be a full-time artist. JoeSam. was named an artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Learning through Education in the Arts Project (LEAP) in 1987. In 1999, he became a Djerassi Artist-in-Residence in Woodside, California and was awarded the Compton Foundation Fellowship. He executed commissioned artworks for several institutions including the San Francisco Mission Police Station Juvenile Facility, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Rosa Parks Metro Rail Station, and the Sharks Ice Center in San Jose, California. During his four decades in San Francisco, he forged life-long friendships with other Bay Area painters including Robert Colescott, Joe Overstreet, Raymond Saunders, Arthur Monroe and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. He is a self-taught artist who has been practicing for over 40 years. JoeSam. received his B.A. degree in sociology in 1961 from St. Paul’s College in Virginia, his M.S. degree in educational psychology from Columbia University in New York, and his Ph.D. in education and psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has been commissioned to create artwork for commercial purposes including The Invisible Hunters (1987), which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book; and album covers for Bobby McFerrin’s Medicine Man (1990), Bennie Maupin and Dr. Patrick Gleeson’s Driving While Black (1998), and Upsurge’s All Hands-on Deck (2000) and Chromatology (2004). Recent group exhibitions include The Avant Garde: Those Ahead of Their Time at Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
