JOEL KOPP

Joel Kopp has been making art for five decades. As would many
of his life’s defining accomplishments, his career as a painter, wood carver, and iron sculptor of singular inventiveness began with an opportunity seized. A salesman in a New York City camera shop where Joel worked in high school won an oil painting kit in a contest. The older man had had no use for the kit and offered it to anyone who would take it. Joel, who had never before painted, jumped at the chance. “It was just something I wanted to try,” he says. “I never questioned why I wanted to paint. I thought it would be something I could do.” 

Born in New York City in 1937, the only child of Manny and Beatrice Kopp, Joel grew up in the close-knit Jewish neighborhood of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. When Joel was five, his father died. To make ends meet, his mother took in seamstress work.

Joel himself began to contribute to the family’s precarious finances while still in grade school, working a variety of small jobs. By high school, he was largely supporting his mother.

Joel worked his way through New York Community College and then New York University. After a stint with a wholesale photography distributor, he landed a job as a stockbroker. At the time, he believed Wall Street would become his career. Soon, however, another opportunity arose. A stationery store came up for sale on Park Place near City Hall Plaza. Typically, Joel took it, buying the shop with a business partner, Lester Hirsh, in 1963. 

Meanwhile, Joel continued to make art. A frequent visitor to New York’s museums and galleries, he found himself increasingly drawn to the strong, deeply personal styles of masters who worked outside the artistic mainstream. Van Gogh, Rousseau, Modigliani, Kahlo, and Chagall became his mentors, inspiring him to pursue his own unique vision. Beginning in 1955 with a series of intricate chess pieces, his vision extended to woodcarving. From his first exploratory efforts, his painting and carving flowered into a confident, fully realized style marked by sly allusion to art history, jazz, and the American pop culture of his youth. 

After four years as a stationer, Joel sold the shop and went back to the brokerage business. In 1966, a new life-changing chance presented itself, one of a different order altogether: Joel met Kate O’Connell, a fellow painter. Two years later, they married. Soon after, Joel left Wall Street for good to launch, with Kate, a new venture called America Hurrah Antiques, NYC. Operating initially out of a basement storefront on the East Side of Manhattan, the pioneering antiques shop specialized in American quilts, hooked rugs, folk art, and American Indian art. At the time, the market for Americana was relatively untested. There was an opportunity there. The business thrived.

In 1980, with America Hurrah firmly established as a Manhattan institution, Joel and Kate bought an old summer camp in upstate New York and began transforming the lakeside retreat into a country home. During trips up from the city, Joel, a collector both by profession and temperament, scoured yard sales and small antiques markets for anything that looked interesting. Lots of iron parts began showing up at the weekend place — shovels, axe heads, cast iron stoves, tractor parts, radiators. These inspired him to create his first found-object sculpture, Shovels from China, in 1994. Many others soon followed: zoological curiosities, whimsical human figures, miracles of botany. With the addition of iron-working to his repertoire, Joel at first relied on friends and neighbors Lou and Brian Velie to weld his elaborate pieces. In short time, he mastered the technique himself and soon was doing all his own work. As each new piece was completed, he installed it amid the old camp’s flower  beds, meadows, and pathways. The grounds became a supremely playful sculpture garden.

After thirty successful years, Joel and Kate closed America Hurrah in 2000. They retired to their country place, where Joel dedicated himself fully to his art. Surrounded by his iron inventions, old friends weathering gracefully in an enchanted landscape, he continues to produce new paintings, carvings, and sculpture of restless intelligence, cunning humor, and enormous appeal.

 – Kevin Markey