Menageries and Other Worlds
Joseph B. O'Sickey
A Retrospective 1941-2007

Apr 14-Jun 9, 2007

Sun Apr 22 3-5pm
Opening reception

Sat May 5 6-10 pm
Cirque des artistes. Click here to buy tickers!

Sat Jun 9 6-10 pm
A Summer Afternoon with Joe O'Sickey: Closing reception, book signing and discussion. Free and open to the public. Please note: Joe O'Sickey will be unable to attend this discussion. Bill Busta is scheduled to give remarks at 2pm. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Curated by William Busta and Richard Sarian, this important exhibition surveys works of O'Sickey from seven decades - his sketches of India and Africa from his years in the Army during the 1940s; advertising and design work from the 1940s and 1950s; continuing series of landscape, still-life and garden paintings; and recent work based upon circus themes.

Among the most honored painters active in the region, O'Sickey won the Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts in 1974, and was called "a dean of painting in Northeast Ohio" by Steven Litt, art and architecture critic of the Plain Dealer. The artist was born in Detroit in 1918, and grew up in Cleveland. He graduated from the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) in 1940 and taught at Ohio State University (1946-47), Akron Art Institute (1949-52), Western Reserve University School of Architecture (1956-64), and Kent State University (1964-89). His painting was informed by his teachers at the Cleveland School of Art, including Henry G. Keller, Paul B. Travis, and Frank N. Wilcox, as well as informal, graduate-level study with Hoyt Sherman. However, his work continued to develop through his 20s, strongly influenced by post-impressionism, and his ongoing engagement with the possibilities of visual perception.

O'Sickey was represented in New York by Jacques Seligmann Galleries during the 1960s and 1970s (which presented seven one-person shows of his work) and by Kennedy Galleries in the 1980s and 1990s. In Ohio, notable exhibitions include a Distinguished Alumnus one-person show at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1982); a one-person show at the Canton Museum of Art (1995); exhibition in 24 May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art between 1938 and 1977, and current representation at Vixieboxie Art Galleries.

His work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Cleveland Public Library; Canton Museum of Art, Ohio; Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; and Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.

"This exhibition will be an eye-opener for fans and collectors familiar with O'Sickey's beautiful garden paintings, revealing new dimensions of the artist," says Sharon Dean, executive director of Cleveland Artists Foundation. "In his work, you'll see an artist who witnessed everything from Impressionism to Cubism and Pop art, and the then-new profession of graphic and commercial art. His work not only masters those movements, but builds upon them."

A catalogue of the exhibition is available for $20. Click here to purchase.

Cleveland Artists Foundation at the Beck Center for the Arts
17801 Detroit Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44107-3413
Phone: 216.227.9507
Fax: 216 228 6050