Artist Bio

Joel Foster was born in 1949 in Northampton, Massachusetts and grew up in the Plymouth area of Massachusetts and Kent, CT. Foster worked closely with sculptors, fabricating (welding). He printed multi-colored engraved editions for various other professional artists.

Foster has presented seminars at the Northwest Community College in Winsted, CT.

Joel Foster attended SUNY Purchase School of Visual Arts majoring in both sculpture and printmaking in the late '70's and studied under Tal Streeter and Murray Zimilies. He worked for many years printing intaglio series for other artists and fabricating large metal sculptures for public spaces, as well as working in the painting and decorating business. He is the recipient of an A.R.T. (Artists Resource Trust) Fund Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. He has been exhibited at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, the New York State Museum in Albany, a pop-up show on Access Disability in Soho in connection with the Museum of Modern Art and at the RE Institute in Millerton, New York. He is a member of the Blind Artists Society.

Statement

Joel Foster’s work is all the more remarkable because he is legally blind. He has learned to work with tactility using the manipulations of masking tape along with infinite patience to achieve each line. His method comes out of his insistence on process and the results are sharp and spontaneous in feel. With an emphasis on abstract principles, Foster’s core imagery draws on architectural forms that dissect and present the man-made world. The apparent ease of some of the lines appear as though done by a child, belying the actual sophistication of the image.

Foster states that he is more influenced by things man-made than by nature and that he is interested in the places where man and nature intersect. His paintings are built from layers of basic colors, depicting deceptively simple images: some from his childhood, others from this world, or his imagination: staircases, ladders, road markings, doors and wheels. On the scaffolding of such images, Foster repeats a series of sometimes humorous variations of the same theme, like a jazz musician, riffing the same rhythm over and over again. Purely abstract integrity is never sacrificed, but the identifiable objects repeat in odd combinations, the staircase, perennially, perhaps speaking different meanings to each viewer.

The work is definite and crisp. Our knowing more about the artist’s work process adds to our understanding. Having become legally blind in 2008 with a genetic condition called Stargardt’s Disease that blocks all central vision, Foster now works with new methods to overcome his handicap. We can not strictly categorize Foster in any one way: color specialist, hard-edge artist or abstract painter. Rather, he draws on all of these and more. And even if an image of his comes from a ladder he once scaled, he gives that ladder some universal quality.

Curriculum Vitae

EXHIBITIONS

2015 Re Institute, Millerton, New York “Reverse Engineer,” installation of “Stairs Revisited,” a series of paintings on paper by Joel Foster.

2010-11 Art East Open Studio Tour

2011 Seti Gallery, Kent, CT

2010 Rensselear Polytechnic Institute, BAS Group Show

2009 Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY -2nd Annual Blind Artists Society Exhibit (BAS)

2008 Albany Institute of History and Art -1st Annual BAS Exhibit, benefitting the Northeast Association for the Blind (NABA), 100th Anniversary

2008 - 2010 Wassaic Project (www.wassaicproject.org)

2007 Printhouse for the Blind, Frankfurt, Kentucky
Artwell Gallery, Group Show

2006 Northern Exposure Gallery, Kent, CT
Art East Open Studio Tour, 2010, 2011

EARLY EXHIBITIONS

Silvermine New England Annual Group Show

--Review with honorable mention by Clement Greenberg, N.Y. Times
Hudson River Museum Group Show
Katonah Gallery, group print show, print in permanent collection
Somerstown Gallery, group print collection
Bedford Historical Society Annual Art Show, Bedford, NY
Renova Gallery, Warren, CT