Joseph O'Sickey

20th century abstract still life by Cleveland School artist

Joseph O'Sickey, born in Detroit in 1918, has been a painter and teacher throughout his career. As a child he attended Saturday classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which retains one of his paintings in its permanent collection, and the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he received a Bachelor's degree in 1940. He graduated from the Cleveland School of Art (now the Cleveland Institute of Art) in 1940 and taught at Ohio State University (1946-47), Akron Art Institute (1949-52), Western Reserve University School of Architecture (1956-64), and Kent State University (1964-89). Among the most honored painters active in the region, O'Sickey won the Cleveland Arts Prize in Visual Arts in 1974, and was called "a dean of painting in Northeast Ohio" by Steven Litt, art and architecture critic of the Plain Dealer. However, his work continued to develop through his 20s, strongly influenced by post-impressionism. O'Sickey was represented in New York by Jacques Seligmann Galleries during the 1960s and 1970s (which presented seven one-person shows of his work) and by Kennedy Galleries in the 1980s and 1990s. In Ohio, notable exhibitions include a Distinguished Alumnus one-person show at the Cleveland Institute of Art (1982); a one-person show at the Canton Museum of Art (1995); exhibition in 24 May Shows at the Cleveland Museum of Art between 1938 and 1977. O'Sickey's work is also in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Canton Museum of Art, Ohio; Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; and Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia.