Want to smile? Want to be amused? Want to be amazed? And do you just want to have a grand time? Enter the world of The Radiator Kid, The Arbus Twins, Big Face, Shelly, The Bug Lady, Spiny Bulbous, Scrapasaurus and Iron Minnie †Queen of the Junkyard, among others, and you have entered the world of Joel Kopp. Tucked away in an enchanted setting in upstate New York, Joel has let his imagination run free, his boundless creativity loose and his artistic talents released to create his family of sculpture made from found pieces. Tractor and lawnmower parts, axes, shovels, radiators, steam irons, chains, kettles, rakes and hoes, and just about anything you can name have taken some fanciful shape under his sharp eye and welding tools.
But to tell the whole story of Joel Kopp, we have to jump back to 1937 when Joel, an only child, was born into and raised in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx. He was five when his father died, his mother worked hard to support them, and in grade school Joel was performing small jobs to help. “I did not play the way other kids did, but had a series of jobs that opened up an extraordinary world into my world,” Joel said.
While in high school, Joel worked in a New York City camera shop where one of the salesmen won a contest and received a painting kit. Having no use for it, the man gave it to Joel and his urge to “try painting” was satisfied. In 1959, he did his first oil painting, titled “Redroom †Bedroom,” showing a section of his family’s Bronx apartment.
His face lights up with a smile when he tells a story from his childhood about shoveling off the sidewalk in front of his home, and then continuing on up the street clearing a path in front of a row of stores. The meat market of Menasha Kiner was one of the establishments on the route, and the butcher came out and gave him a quarter for his effort. He then asked Joel how much the other merchants had paid him, and he said, “Nothing.” Kiner went into his market, put on a big burly coat and took Joel into each store where the walk had been cleared and collected a quarter from every one of them. He then advised Joel, “Never work for nothing.”
“It was a lesson well learned,” Joel said, and this experience as a youth, firmly etched in his mind, was the subject of a painting he did in 1998 depicting “Me and Menasha Kiner” in front of the meat market, complete in winter coats and posed beside his red-handled shovel.
A series of odd jobs paved the way for Joel to attend New York Community College and New York University, and after a short career with a photography distributor, he became a stockbroker. “At the time, I felt I had found the job for a lifetime, but in 1963 I became a partner in a stationery store,” he said. Four years later, he was back on Wall Street, while his creative energy and talent produced a flow of paintings and small wood carvings, including a series of chess pieces.
“The year 1966 was a great year, it changed my life,” Joel said, recalling the time he met Kate O’Connell, a painter in her own right. Two years later they were married during the time “I was working in New York designing clothes,” Kate said. A honeymoon took them to London, where they discovered the Portobello markets filled with things that caught their interest. “We bought for two days straight and kept sending things back to all our friends,” Kate said. Before returning to New York, they searched for treasures in markets in Spain and Amsterdam, finding countless things along the way.
Joel, a born collector with an interest in just about everything, now had a partner who shared this love of his, and soon they were fixtures every Saturday night at the auction in Wingdale, N.Y. “We started buying quilts, filled our apartment and basement storage, and discovered banana boxes, which we filled with things,” Joel said. In addition to a small shop, they sold their many purchases at the Coliseum Antiques Show under Wendy Management and even took space with Bernie Zipkin at his “village” in Mahopac, N.Y.
“Another favorite weekly auction of ours was in Hamden, Conn., run by Joe Pari,” Kate said. “We had been searching for a name for our shop, and one evening after Joe knocked down an object, he said, ‘To Young America,’ and a bell went off, we looked at each other, and America Hurrah Antiques was born,” she said. The first shop was only 8 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6½ feet high, with a daybed, piled high with quilts, in the center.
“Saturday was our day for shopping and we would pile into the car early in the morning and head off for either Pennsylvania or parts of New England. As a result, we were closed that day and made up the time by opening on Sunday, a time when most of the New York City shops were closed,” Kate said. “It worked, and we were always busy.”
America Hurrah Antiques closed its doors in 2000 after 30 great years of building collections, selling to museums and taking part in some of the major antiques shows in the country. “We were at the very back of the Winter Antiques Show for 18 years,” Joel said, “and we loved the location, even though it was cold during setup with the back doors of the 67th Street Armory on Lexington Avenue open.” He believed it was more than an even tradeoff, however, as they were the first to pack out and often were on their way within a few hours after the show closed.
America Hurrah Antiques, during its three decades in New York City, became a destination for collectors and was among a handful of dealers who brought attention to quilts, folk art, American Indian art and hooked rugs. And, as is bound to happen, they built a personal collection of favorite things that they sold to fellow antiques dealers during the first three years after closing the shop. “All of our major things sold, really bringing to a close our years in the business,” Kate said.
But all during the reign of America Hurrah as a major player on the Americana field, Joel and Kate continued to sprout new interests and other avenues of collecting. Always on the go, their need to feel the pace of the city did not stand in the way of a golden opportunity to purchase a large tract of land in the country. An old summer campsite on a small, crystal-clear lake provided the chance they were looking for and a new project became an important part of their lives. They bought the property in 1980 and moved slowly, fixing up the cabins to fit the Kopp pattern of life.
With new large windows, the outside was brought inside, porches fitted with comfortable couches and rockers were added, the kitchen was remodeled and brought up-to-date and every nook and cranny started to fill up with one collection or another. Over the years, bird nests have been gathered about the property and now line many of the window sills, a march of the penguins, numbering in the hundreds, parades across several shelves, and a new interest, wine bottles with birds pictured on the labels, now almost fills one rustic beam over the kitchen area.
Photographs, long a favorite interest of collecting for Joel, take every bit of wall space in his studio where he paints and carves while surrounded by the faces of those he admires. “I have photographs of only people I respect and like,” he says of the portrait gallery he has built. Among his favorites, Josephine Baker, Thomas Jefferson and, of course, Louis Armstrong, who also figures prominently in some of his paintings and carvings. Each photograph is accompanied by a letter or some document signed by the person in the picture and is beautifully framed and matted by Joel himself.
“He is very particular about this collection,” Kate said, “and he tries to come up with a picture of the person taken about the same time as the dated documents with which it is framed.”
America Hurrah showed one side of Joel Kopp †his sharp eye for design and color and his instinct to weigh the antiques market and bring to it material that was, over the years, welcomed by museums, collectors and those just getting their feet wet in the field of antiques. The other side of Joel was equally active, a side bursting with ideas that go well beyond the norm. His creative juices never dried and his works are here to prove it.
“The Egrets: Eileen and Her Husband, I Don’t,” painted white with yellow bills and measuring 45 and 74 inches tall, respectively, stand in a perfect setting by the lake amid a clump of cattails with water lilies about their feet. Their sweptback feathers are constructed from a series of blades from scythes and sickles. “Dragonfly I,” with his woven pitch fork wings and bolts for feet, appears to have landed close by on a rock, while “Eastern Spade Back,” 28 inches high, seems to have just crawled out of the lake to dry off. With claw hammer feet, auto spring legs and shovels providing a protective back, he looks at ease mounted on his cast iron rock.
“Iron Minnie †Queen of the Junkyard,” 67 inches tall on her flat-iron shoes, her red painted skirt from an inverted tub with large white spots, yellow hands, a body of old tire rims and a yellow flower made from an old faucet handle sticking out of her red painted pail hat, is doing just what her title suggests. She is standing in the midst of Joel’s junkyard, a well organized conglomeration of discarded metal objects ranging in size from old barrels to tiny nuts that someday may make their way into one of his sculptures as a button or an eye.
The inspiration that draws these fanciful creatures out of Joel generally starts with a single object. “I come across something, an old tire iron, a bundle of faucets or a painted shovel, for instance, and I can see it as the beginning of a certain creature. And it grows from there,” he said. His collection of shovel heads brought to mind a childhood axiom that if you dug deep enough in the ground you would reach China. He painted 33 spades red, planted them upside-down at different angles in an area about 15 by 30 feet, and created “Shovels from China.” “Every few years I repaint them,” he said, as they weather out in a field against a backdrop of tall grasses.
A couple of bicycle chains was the beginning of “The Arbus Twins,” as they were perfectly suited to simulate hair on the figures with large iron can bodies. A stack of nuts was assembled for the eyes, the nose a ball-peen hammer, a chain link for the mouth and arms made from window weights. An iron chain, double wrapped, added a fringe to the bottom of the skirt, and window weight legs end in flat iron shoes.
Every artist has a favorite piece and with Joel there was no hesitation in answering. “‘Eddie Malloy, the Real McCoy, Performing His Famous Tea for Two Number,'” was his reply. Eddie, with a cast iron tea kettle on a rod balanced on his nose, and a cup and saucer, also on a rod, balanced in each hand, has a special spot in the yard and also graces the cover of Joel’s book.
“I have my favorite also,” Kate said, pointing out the colorful bouquet of iron flowers that all but lights up the top of the cast iron stove in the living room. “Nothing fit there and one day Joel made me that arrangement, an old iron kettle filled with flowers made from scrap pieces and old water faucet handles.” Many of the handles retain the original painted surface, others have been touched up. “I would never part with that piece,” she added.
Early in his “iron” career, Joel was totally inexperienced with the art of welding and had help from neighbors. It was not long, however, before he had mastered another trade and set himself up with the necessary equipment. “I liked the independence it brought me and I was able to work on my own schedule,” he said. And to see what has been created over the past ten to 15 years, that schedule was full.
The subjects of his paintings are all over the lot, Carmen Miranda dancing in the moonlight; Houdini, chained and hanging upside down under water while being freed by four mermaids; Toulouse-Lautrec visiting a gallery hung only with paintings by Joel Kopp; “A. Calder looking at K. Kopp looking at a Calder”; the 1937 Supreme Court; Sitting Bull with Albert Einstein; William Edmundson surrounded by his carvings; and Jimmy Durante as Cyrano, the role he was born to play.
His favorite people do not escape his carving talents, for here we find Einstein, Van Gogh, Amelia Earhart, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Edmundson, Sitting Bull, Hattie Brunner and even Kate and Joel.
It is a real challenge to flip through the pages of Joel Kopp †Sculpture, Paintings, Carvings without thinking how nice one of those pieces of sculpture would look in your own garden, maybe a painting with a penguin to hang, or even a wood carving to show off on the mantel. So it brings up the question, “How many pieces in the collection are for sale?” “None,” the artist replies. “We have never sold any of my sculptures, paintings or carvings.” Just the answer you did not want to hear.
The Book
“We decided a couple of years ago that it would be nice to record Joel’s work in a book, so we set about it thinking we had taken on a very lengthy project,” Kate said. Michael Fredericks, the photographer, started shooting at 10:30 am one Saturday and by 6 pm had done close to 50 objects. When everything was placed in the hand of the book designer, Hans Teensma/Impress, Inc, in late February 2007, the pace never slowed and the book was off the press by September. The cover shows Joel’s favorite piece, “Eddie Malloy, the Real McCoy, Performing His Famous Tea for Two number.”
The book has a limited printing of 500 copies and is available from Joel Kopp, 230 Central Park West, Apt 12A, New York, NY 10024 or by calling 212-362-1653. It is $95, post paid, and will be autographed on request (enclose the desired inscription on a slip of paper with your check).
