Joel Babb's Bio

Joel Babb's Bio

Joel Babb graduated in Art History from Princeton in 1969, studied with George Segal and George Ortman and spent a year in Munich and Rome before coming to Boston to get an MFA from the Museum School and Tufts. There his style changed from abstraction to a contemporary realism. His cityscapes are the works for which he is best known in Boston. Some are street level panoramas like the large "View of Harvard Square" in the Charles Hotel, Cambridge. Others are panoramas from a high prospect like the "View from the Roof of 500 Boylston" for Mass Financial, or the "View from the Financial District" at Standish, Ayer and Wood, or the "View of Cincinnati" done for Gradison Investments. All of the panoramas play with problems of flattening a wide angled space into a picture plane.
In 1984 he began a series of aerial views based on photos he took from a helicopter over Boston. These are often experimental perspectives like the one point perspective straight down of "Copley Plunge" or the "View of Back Bay" at Harvard Business School and the two paintings for Fidelity. In the late 1980's he began a series of large landscapes of the woods near his studio in Sumner, Maine. One is "The Hounds of Spring" which hangs in Baker Library at Harvard Business School.
In 1996 he finished the painting recreating the first successful kidney transplant which hangs in the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School, working with the doctors who achieved this important medical innovation.

He has been in shows at Naga in Boston, Sherry French, Gerold Wunderlich, and The National Academy in New York City, Frost Gully Gallery, Maine Coast Artists, Portland Museum of Art and the Ogunquit Museum in Maine, Trudy Labell Fine Arts in Florida, and many other galleries and museums.