Joe Stefanelli, born in Philadelphia in 1921, belongs to the famous group of the New York School of American Abstract Expressionists which also included, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. The group was prominent in the art world in the forties and fifties and helped New York achieve the status of an internationally leading art metropolis.
Stefanelli studied painting at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts, the New York School for Social Research, and the Art Students League of New York. He was a member of the “Downtown Group” comprised of a group of artists with studios in lower Manhattan, and showed in the infamous Ninth Street Show of 1951. Stefanelli, taught at various institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Columbia University.
His works have been shown internationally at numerous institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Institute, at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Albright Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. In the year 2000 Stefanelli received the New York Krasner Pollock Foundation award for his life’s work; in 2005 he received the Benjamin Altman Prize for painting from the National Academy Museum.