Joseph DiStefano: 1940 – 2020
Joseph DiStefano was fond of saying that life is like luggage. One might have a simple empty backpack, or whole sets of glorious Samsonite, bursting at the seams. Joe’s choices in life and in luggage were obvious to anyone who knew him. An avid collector of experiences, of friends, and of stories, he was a consummate raconteur: the life of every party, and a glorious visual artist, described by one reviewer as “a giant in a paint factory.” He had a compact frame and traditional Italian features. When asked how he’d been doing, he often said, “It’s been a long year. I used to be tall, blonde and Swedish.”
Joe earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1969 and went on to Yale University, where he completed his Masters of Fine Arts in 1971.
After his graduation from Yale, Joe went on to teach woodworking and advanced sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the University of California at Berkeley. His own work flourished; he was an extremely prolific artist and was adept at blending traditional sculptural concepts with modern materials and functionality. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant — Eight Artists in Industry — at the Kohler Ceramics Company. In the late 1970s, Joe began working with concrete as a sculptural medium, and invented the oft-imitated casting technique using fabric as formwork. Seven of his concrete sculptures were displayed in his one-artist shows at the Museo Italiano in San Francisco, at the Mackler Gallery in Philadelphia, and at the Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland. Charles Shere, a reviewer from the Oakland Tribune hailed Joe’s work as “surreal, biomorphic, sensual, often witty.” “It’s that rare thing,” remarked Shere—“a new technique, exactly enhancing the stony but somehow manufactured presence of the images themselves.”
Joe was a member of the 45th Street Artists' Cooperative for over 30 years. His business card read: “You’ll Own a DiStefano Someday” And, in fact, Emeryville does now own a DiStefano sculpture donated by Joe and his partner Diane Troy in 2020 to the City of Emeryville and installed in Old Town Hall.
