About the artist:

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.”

Joseph DiStefano earned his BFA at Rochester Institute of Technology and his MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. 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 Kohler Co.

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’s works have been commissioned and collected by numerous public and private collectors including the Eastman Kodak Corporation, Kohler Co, the Voulkos Family Collection, the Archdiocese of Oakland, the State of California, and the City of Sacramento, The Rochester Institute of Technology and the City of Emeryville, CA. His public art commissions include artwork for the Hammer Lane Underpass in Stockton, California, “Your Memory Column” at the General Services Administration in the Oakland Federal Building, and the 7’×90′ wall-mural at the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission.