Joseph Garlock: An Immigrant's Gift to America

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Published on January 14, 2015

Joseph Garlock (1884-1980) Joseph Garlock's life story is both unique and universal. His flight from Russia in 1904 after feeling the drum beat of the pogroms and then his arrest as a student radical fits a familiar pattern. As does his arrival at Ellis Island and early years of American life on New York's Lower East Side. A lucky break and help from a cousin took Joseph and his wife Anna to Bloomfield, New Jersey where they raised a family and lived the life of small time entrepreneurs. In 1949 Joseph Garlock retired. At that "moment" a new spark was lit. The unique happened when he began to spend weekends and summers with his daughter Rose at her rustic cabin in the Catskills. Rose was the catalyst, the enabler, and a new muse was released. Joseph Garlock began to sculpt and paint unleashing what must have been a lifetime of internal artistic persuasion. He created art daily and compulsively for fourteen years. No doodler he! No subject was too complex, no thought or passion was beyond his ability to express. The resultant body of artwork is astonishing in both number and sophistication. His daughter Rose, an Adler Institute trained art therapist, understood this and attempted to champion his work. But alas, circumstances cheated the art world...for a while. Joseph developed a Palsy and stopped working. He and Rose died and his artwork stayed sequestered in a Woodstock shed for twenty years. in 2000 Joseph's grandchildren pried open the shed revealing, to their astonishment, hundreds of pieces of their grandfather's art work. The rest, as they say, is history.