Joseph Wheelwright: His Art and Accolades
Peter J. Marcucci
Special Contributor
It was a hot and airless late spring morning, and the Boston streets were hectic as I parked at Eleven Humphreys Street, an old building in a gentrifying area of Dorchester. I was late, and I knew it, and I was unsure of where to go.
Cautiously and instinctively, looking in every direction, I began walking up the long corridor where, to my relief, stood a welcoming Joseph Wheelwright. He was a tall and fit man of sixty-five years, with a calm voice and a working man’s handshake. He invited me into his studio filled with equipment, tools and art. Lots of art.
Few words were spoken while he made coffee, giving me a few minutes to focus on the stone, wood and bronze renderings that stood mixed with machines and tools, producing every whim and desire of the artist.
Most of Wheelwright’s art looked fanciful. All were compelling. A collage—yes. Eclectic—you bet. Dazzling—Oh, yeah! A trove of feelings and images, colors and elements. Genius. Brilliant. Unique. A compendium of the rare, the inimitable and the exceptional.
With each of us settled and sipping coffee, Wheelwright began opening up about his art and his accolades of the last fifty years.
“My mother was an art history major, and I grew up on art and started going to museums when I was a little boy. In second and third grade I took art lessons because my mom decided I had talent. I had no idea if I did or not, but like any little kid, you don’t want to disappoint your mother, so she signed me up and I took painting lessons. I think from then on I never wanted to do anything else.”
Soon after graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1970, Joseph and college girlfriend, Susan, were married and living in a Vermont commune. It was at this point that Wheelwright began producing his art to make a living.
“We were hippies in Vermont, and I was making tables at a woodshop. They were made of walnut and glass and had a painting on top, a painting under the glass, and a mirror with a painting. I’d then schlep ’em on a trailer and go to the trade shows. That was in the early 70s.
“Within three years I could see it was going to be tough making a living producing art, so I went back to graduate school, but this time it was an art school, the Rhode Island School of Design, and got a Masters Degree in sculpture. I then taught art at Wellesley College and Clark College, but within a few years the art I was making started to sell, so for the last thirty-five years, creating art has been my only income.”
Wheelwright then explained that around 1985 he met Carlos Dorian, a stone carver who let him use his shop and tools to carve stone heads. Until then he had been carving wood, but said it was fun to turn to another natural material, and within a year began buying his own tools and carving lots of stone.
When asked if stone was his favorite medium, he said, “Right at the moment, yes. I’ve had a year off from carving with stone, so I’m itching to get back to work. The main body of my work has always been carving weather beaten stones with a ‘personality’, into heads.
“Most work is done on speculation with very little being commissioned. I have done a few, but they are much harder because someone is telling you what to make and how to make it.
“A couple of them had unhappy endings when people didn’t get what they wanted, so I figured the better idea was to just make what I want and sell it to someone who wants it. So there is never a problem. Of course there may be fewer dollars coming in sometimes. My wife is a teacher, and we live simply here in Dorchester.”
By our final sip of coffee, it was time to tour the outdoor area. We walked under the chain-falls and through the maze of projects to the backyard, and he pointed at the different projects while speaking calmly and proudly, like a father speaking of his children’s accomplishments.
“This is where I try to carve in the summer,” Wheelwright explained outside. “It’s kind of fun because there is no phone out here and I can work uninterrupted. Some are greenish, but most turn a brown patina,” he said pointing to a huge bronze tree person. “His name is ‘Smoke Jumper’, and he was at the Katonah Museum for the last two years. A big tree costs around $300,000 to cast in bronze, but I’m just not getting them sold these days.”
We then walked past a large stone head named “Fox Face” and toward one of Wheelwright’s latest projects: an unnamed five ton head of granite. “Usually I work alone and that’s the way I like it,” he told me as he turned and picked up a pneumatic hammer. He then began shaping the unnamed head as I watched. I stood shooting pictures, watching a master sweat in the even hotter afternoon sun. And the dust flew.
“We bought the building in 2001,” a dusty Wheelwright remarked as we walked back inside. “In the late ’90s, there was a big real estate boom in Boston, and artists everywhere were losing their studios and needed a place to go. This building housed a dry cleaning company, and the past tenants had left it polluted and filled with junk, and it sat unoccupied for many years.
“Seeing the need for a haven for displaced artists, we bought it and spent two years cleaning it up and making it safe. It now houses 27 studios and over 50 artists. Susan and I also spend every summer on our land in East Corinth, Vermont,” he said, while showing me a picture of a 47 foot tall tree man adding, “The Vermont facility has become the center of action for our big work, with cranes and a tumbler available for large stones. It’s where I can do the more dangerous stuff that I can’t do here, like a foundry.
“In 2003-2004, the deCordova Museum and Sculpture park in Lincoln, Massachusetts was a big kickoff at the time for our latest stone sculptures. Miami has also been a wonderful town for me. You get calls out of the blue or on the internet much of the time. We also have a group here called The Boston Sculptors Gallery which I founded with ten other people 20 years ago. Every other year I have a ‘root show’. This has been my eleventh year, and I always try to attend the openings of these shows.”
When asked what has kept him in art all these years, Joe responded with passion and emotion by saying, “What’s more fun than to make art? The hard part is the life itself. You suffer periods when you’re not selling and you feel bad at home and feel like you’re falling behind. The actual making of a mark is a pure pleasure. Once I’m on a roll and I wake up and know what I’m working on, I just want to get here and do it! It’s an escape, too, in a way.
“It seems to me that one of the most miraculous aspects of human endeavor is that people devote their whole lives to something that has no utilitarian function, like poetry, for the purpose of spiritual gratification of the human soul and mind. Creating sculpture is the purest kind of endeavor, if you can get away with it.”
“And if you can get paid for it,” I said—and we both laughed.
“An artist commits suicide in his 30s and has no idea that he’s making work for the ages. If you read his letters at the time, he is totally blissed out, but life has thrown him a curve ball and he just can’t bare the pain. So, the endeavor itself is the draw. If you can allow yourself to do art, that is the tough thing and there is nothing to not enjoy about creating it. It’s just a pleasure, and I’ve never done anything else.”
In case you’ve been wondering about the name Wheelwright: it comes from a long tradition of wheel makers from Wales and passed down from six generations of ancestors from Maine.
In case you’ve been wondering about his art: it comes from a diverse imagination of what is possible. Things that we see as objects, he sees as art. Combine this with his resourceful nature and keen ability to work with nature and not against it, and you will begin to understand his mind: it is calm, serene and tranquil and yes, playful. “Listening Stone” and “Rockababy Moon” are good examples of this.
With an long list of solo and group exhibitions, as well as public commissions and gallery affiliations, the past to Joe means little, and the future means everything. Joseph Wheelwright is truly an old-world virtuoso with contemporary sensibility.
Peter J. Marcucci has over 25 years of fabrication experience in the stone industry. Send your comments to our Contacts page.