BIOGRAPHY GALLERY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Born on the south side of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during World War II, the son of John Palermo, gandy dancer for the Pennsylvania and Lake Erie Railroad, and Perrina Palermo, opera singer and housewife. Enlisting in the U.S. Marines in 1958, subsequently lived in New York and other countries of the world.
In the sense of adventure, Palermo is an artist who has been everywhere and done most everything. An undefeated amateur boxer in the Marine Corps, he was honorably discharged out of the service in Spain and spent several months apprenticed to Joan Miró. Back in the U.S. he dealt blackjack in Las Vegas, managed a doo-wop vocal group called the Delcos, and was a professional jazz musician. Rejoining the military, he attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts while serving as an air traffic controller in Paris for three years. He then served a tour in VietNam and was wounded in action as a member of the 19th Air Commandos. Shortly after the military he traveled to Africa as a mercenary on a life-saving mission. Later in the U.S., he helped found the famous Torpedo Factory artists’ co-op in Alexandria, Virginia. He then spent ten years living in Spain as a highly respected expatriate artist.
Finally, Palermo cast his fate in Las Vegas again, soon serving as President and Executive Director of the new Las Vegas Art Museum. In 2003 he co-founded the Henderson Art Association. Through all this life-flux, Palermo remained an artist first and foremost, a painter and a sculptor. As an artist, his work has been through many changes, as has his colorful life. Master of many styles, he has floated freely among them, adopting and discarding them in an experimental journey that has now brought him to the innovative frontier of American art.
Joseph Palermo’s art of four decades runs a gamut of engagement with most of the deconstructive, formal, and stylistic innovations of the twentieth century. At a minimum, work exemplifying all of the following Modern movements are present within his overall oeuvre: Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Action Painting, geometric abstraction. Conceptualism has a bearing upon his works of calligraphic scribble on transparent plastic film, and Mimimalism bears upon his stainless steel sculptures. On the other hand, scattered throughout his career, figuration in varying degrees of finish, and/or in combination with abstraction, continually reappears, just as it did in the course of the twentieth century at pivotal times of reappraisal or temporary exhaustion of the reductive Modernist direction.
A crucial quality of Palermo’s artistic wanderings through Modernism’s newfound lands is that he took up the various modes listed above only as it suited him at a given time, not in any orderly observance of their chronological evolution and priority. In figuration, his expansive technical facility and stylistic range are completely thorough; in the deconsonstructive modes, his familiarity with and use of their innovations is clear and equally thorough. In his most recent work, he has brought his achievement to the innovative and intellectual frontier of contemporary art. These wanderings were evident in a recent retrospective show of his works at the Las Vegas Art Museum.
