JoeSam.

Mixed media artist JoeSam. was born on September 18, 1938 in Harlem, New York. He received his B.A. degree in sociology in 1961 from Howard University, in Washington, D.C., his M.S. degree in educational psychology from Columbia University, in New York, New York, and his Ph.D. degree in education and psychology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

While a student at Columbia, JoeSam. facilitated educational seminars for public school teachers there and at the Floyd Patterson House in the East Village, a residential treatment facility for juvenile offenders. In 1976, JoeSam. was hired as director of the Head Start program for the City of San Francisco, California.

JoeSam. has created commissioned artworks for several institutions including the San Francisco Mission Police Station Juvenile Facility, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Rosa Parks Metro Rail Station, and the Sharks Ice Center in San Jose, California. He has exhibited at institutions nationwide including the Sargent Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, Merced College in Merced, California, the Mohr Gallery in the Community School of Music and Arts at the Finn Center in Mountain View, California, and the Hartford Public Library in Hartford, Connecticut. His artworks include Hope Flight (1994), Hide-n-Seek (1995), Ice Play (1996), and the Black Bible and Black Jazz series; illustrations for the book The Invisible Hunters (1987), which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book; and album art for Bobby McFerrin’s Medicine Man (1990), Bennie Maupin and Dr. Patrick Gleeson’s Driving While Black (1998), and Upsurge’s All Hands-on Deck (2000) and Chromatology (2004).

JoeSam. was named an artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Learning through Education in the Arts Project (LEAP) in 1987. In 1999, he became a Djerassi Artist-in-Residence in Woodside, California. From 2002 to 2003, JoeSam. served as a Sacatar Artist-in-Residence through the Sacatar Foundation, in Bahia, Brazil.

JoeSam. received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985 and the Compton Foundation Fellowship in 1999.

From The History Makers.