Past Displays - Art: Joseph Coco Displays

Driven by a desire to depict his dreams while studying nature, Joseph Coco has become a visionary in art and naturalism. His research in "synesthesia" (correlations between color and sound) have led him to depict his subjects in both his art and music. Four hundred paintings, drawings, prints, and videos of Joseph's are collected in over two hundred and seventy-five public and private collections, including MOMA in San Francisco; Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon; Galleria Nazionale Di Arte Contemporanea in Rome; Kridel Securities in Paris; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He currently teaches Art Appreciation, Studio, and the History of Rock 'n Rap courses as an Adjunct Professor at Centenary University and Delaware Valley University since 2004, and Montclair State University since 1999.

Starting in May 2022, Centenary University's Taylor Memorial Library exclusively exhibited Joseph Coco's Full Moon series, celebrating its 50th anniversary. Throughout 2022, the library presented one-month installations of the 136 paintings, drawings, and prints in the series. Beginning in July 2023, 2-month installations of other series by Coco that include Full Moon images were exhibited, including works from The Great Falls series; Solar Eclipse and a Nuclear Holocaust; If Walls Could Speak; Manhattan Cityscapes; etc. Centenary has also hosted Joseph twice for the University's prestigious Golden Dome Lecture Series. Taylor Memorial Library holds a copy of the 2022 table book I Paint the Moon, a collection of Joseph Coco's 50 years of Full Moon paintings, as well as many of his artistic DVDs.

Every December, Joseph Coco paints the last full moon as it rises, creating an image to summarize the year. Since 2000, the artist has included January full moon images that "anticipate what the year will look like." Coco's themes reflect interests in astronomy, current events, ritual, and synesthesia. Coco's fascination for archetypal subjects has led him to create images from the places he has lived: Passaic, NJ; Flagstaff, AZ; San Francisco, CA; Boston, MA; Manhattan, NY; Lisbon, Portugal; Rome, Italy; and Messina-Sicily, Italy. The series started in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1972 and continues through the present, in Frenchtown, NJ.

Music accompanies this series, composed and recorded by Coco himself, and is available through Spotify, iTunes, Amazon, etc. The double album is entitled I Paint The Moon: CD1 - Silver Lamp - 13 instrumentals; and CD-2 - I Paint the Moon - 19 lyric tunes with moon themes culled from Coco's 58 albums.

An ongoing series of over 30 years, "Foliage" concentrates on the surfaces of short-lived blossoms and how light is captured on them at different times of day. The series started in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1975. Coco often works in diptych formats, with canvases as large as 66"x42", and triptych wall installations 6 feet wide x 10 feet tall. 

The Paterson Great Falls entered the registry of American National Parks in March 2009. Seated on the Passaic River, The Great Falls are the second largest cascade on the Eastern seaboard surpassed by the Niagara. Native Americans celebrated the Great Falls as sacred ground for birthing and marriage ceremonies. In the 1600s, the Dutch settlers followed their example, developing the first hotels to service weddings and baptisms. In the 1700s, the British built resort hotels, creating the first honeymoon capital in the United States around the irrepressible falls. The falls also powered America's first industrial park, which opened in 1800, fueling the nation to become the manufacturing and labor leader of the world today.

The Paterson Falls have inspired 10 paintings, known as Sound Image, and a series of 16 drawings entitled Falls River. An instrumental music soundtrack composed and recorded by Coco for all the images was edited to the images, creating a cinematic accompaniment to the paintings and drawings. No other artist since the late 1800s has created large-scale panoramic views of the falls, six by four feet, let alone a cycle of canvases depicting the four seasons in four different times of day and night. 

The figure drawings of the Ancestral Falls River series unify the mythological and legendary stories of the Passaic River that made "lovers leap" famous. These figurative images celebrate the thousands who have wedded here. The embryonic shapes seen in the swirling waters symbolize the birth of our industrial nation, as a torrent of immigrants came to Paterson to work their dreams in a land ripe with opportunity. The first night painting, with its Prussian blues and deep indigos, is part of The Full Moon series, which started in December 1983. The Spring-Morning was the second painting with its violet grays of dawn. Summer-Afternoon was painted during the One Hundred Year Flood. The Autumn-Late Afternoon followed.