Professor Joe Coco Presents Art Retrospective

For three years, Taylor Memorial Library has showcased 16 exhibitions from Joseph Coco, adjunct professor of art and music at Centenary since 2004. Currently on exhibition is the Patron’s Collection-- his retrospective of time spent in Northern Arizona in the 1970s-- in the TMLs lobby from July 1 through September 30, 2025.

His retrospective includes a Winter Series and FOLIAGE, which showcase the respective seasons and florescent trees in the Southwest. The Foliage series includes over 75 paintings, 16 of which are on display in the Library. The current art on display includes the foliage and rock formations of Northern Arizona. The Retrospective Northern Arizona Series also includes paintings of Cathedral Rock, Mt. Fremont, Grand Canyon, and a variety of portraits and self-portraits, various family members, utilizing chalk and oil on canvas or linen to create his art. 

Also a professor of music, Coco includes several poster covers from his involvement in the ‘70s music scene. AZ- The Ballads, a collection of over 30 songs, accompanies the retrospective. He released his first album, Never Satisfied, in the Fall of 1979, which secured him a job as a songwriter at Warner Bros throughout the early 1980s. The music was heavily influenced by country, blues, and contemporaries of the time, such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. Double CDs are available, and include four themes and two volumes. 

Coco gave an interview to The Cyclone Chronicle on Wednesday, Nov. 5 to discuss his experience with art over the last 50 years and his current retrospective. 

What inspires you to create art?

What inspires me to create art is self-discovery. It’s part therapy and a lot of education from the point of view of what I am learning about myself. Once I’m learning about myself, I realize how that makes me fit into the community at large and the whole of history. 

What makes me unique today in relationship with my lineage going back to the cave men. To me, art history is more like art-thropology or anthropology, studying the culture of man. I just eat it up.  

Where does your passion for art come from?

I’m a maker. I’m influenced by what I see, and that includes all of it from the past to today. What inspires me is the unique spark of each person. I come across so many people on campus, and I’m walking into these Divine presences. After a while, I get a little jaded, but I’m constantly sensing the magnificence of the essence of people. I’m glad I have never lost that, because it’s really easy to lose. 

What artists have inspired you? 

I would say the Renaissance in particular; French, Italian, German, etc. DaVinci stands out, because he was so multifaceted. A more contemporary artist would be Marc Chagall. He was the first person who I thought, he’s doing fantasy like I’ve been doing since I was a kid. 

Fantasy was always in the realm of religion or mythology, which it had to be. As we’ve come into the last two centuries, personal fantasy has its own place and how people can appreciate the workings of a person’s mind individually without needing the stories of the church or mythology to lean on. 

How do you think art is important to society?

Art is the number one thing. That’s how important it is to me. I would include music in there, because, as a musician, I’m a visually literate person from the point of view I know I learn first through visual media. I learn second through listening. I learn third through reading. If you show me something, it stays right in my brain.

The other thing about art and music is there’s a lot of science behind it. It’s not just fantasy, just from me being an imaginative person. The science of art really intrigues me a lot. 

Where else have you displayed your art?

I had a recent show that just ended in September at Luminary Coffee in Lafayette, NJ. I also had a 60-piece exhibit at Brig O’Doon Coffee House in Ottsville, PA, that ended in the spring.

At eighteen, you moved from Passaic, NJ, to Flagstaff, AZ. What drew you to leave the city for the Southwest?

I got accepted into the anthropology program at NAU. I thought, good, I’m leaving New Jersey. I had researched the best anthropological places. New Jersey had serious archaeological departments, most notably at Princeton– not that I knew it then– due to their funding for archaeological projects around the world. I figured I might as well go where the action was in the Southwest, because there were more dinosaurs. Even though the first dinosaur discovered in America was in New Jersey.

What’s interesting, historically, is that in the 1970s, there was a renewed interest in the human figure and realism. We went through an abstract expressionist period from roughly 1940-1960 which changed with contemporary and pop art, the polar opposite of abstraction. A renewed interest in figures started in the ‘70s when I came up. There was a renewed interest in landscapes, as well. Figures in paintings also told a story. 

Interestingly enough, in the 1980s, the first programs for Mac and PCs were coming out, and people were dealing with images and fixing the images. Of course, that was fertile ground for surrealism, which primarily loves using figures. Now, the best example of how figurative art found fertile ground was in advertising. This, too, mixed surrealism with commercial art. It’s not my forte, but that’s what happened. 

Why did you choose to put this particular series on display in Taylor Memorial Library?

I’ve been staging a lot of shows at the Centenary Library, because Susan Van Alstyne, the library director, asked me to, and the lobby was empty. [Van Alstyne] had a different idea of how to use it. 

When she asked me, it was at the end of the Fine Arts era as a major here at Centenary. Normally, we had fine arts exhibits once a month in the Ferry Building. That ended, so we didn’t have a pool of aspiring artists consistently working on series to showcase. The art classes I teach now are self-explorative. People aren’t necessarily interested in being an artist. They just want to discover the artist in them. 

The fiftieth anniversary of receiving my bachelor's was last summer. 

I haven’t run into anyone from my class who’s collected art from their colleagues and contemporaries at that time, but I was. I always cherish the pieces, because these are people I was influenced by.

I first staged my exhibition in Taylor Memorial Library over six months with three installations and 100-pieces in this collection from people from Northern Arizona as well as people over the last 20 years. While that show was ongoing, I finished organizing my retrospective, which would’ve been essentially 50 years since I graduated. I thought that was a good earmark. 

Are the colors or elements used in your work symbolic?

In the Moon series, especially. Part of the Moon series has a component called synesthesia, which is the correlation between sound and color. Now, there’s a definitive science of it that neuroscientists have been really thinking about a lot the last 20 years. I’ve always intuited it as I did research about it. I realized I wasn’t far off the mark. 

To me, there’s been a component about using color as an allegory in a work, so that it works on someone’s unconscious as they are looking at it based on their cultures. 

Color symbolism has an international component. For example, red, in most cultures, is considered a symbol of energy, shaped in a heart about love. These things go back far. 

Even something with a circle and a light source is symbolic. It could even be a diffused circle. If it has light in it, it’s something about the Divine as well as the sun. Blue is healing and the sky. 

A couple different things like colors and shape symbols have come through the ages. Many different cultures study the effects of particular colors when used in appropriate situations. Gold obviously works well in religious settings as well as silver. But how do you describe silver? Is it bluish? Greenish? Gold is yellow, grassy. Just even naming the colors is an interesting thing, like journalists have to be careful how they use words.

What do you hope students get from viewing your work?

In the retrospective, since I have works from 1972 through 1982, students can see that someone their age started somewhere.

What are you currently working on?

The Moon series is ongoing. I usually have two of those paintings going during the course of the year, because they take 25 to 100 hours to paint, especially when they are 4’x5’ or 3’x4’. I have two unfinished paintings from last year, and I’m about to start the December and January Moon paintings, so I’ll have my plate full with those. 

What has been your biggest challenge as an artist?

Promotion. Getting the word out there. I think that the tools today with the Internet and self-promotion are just fabulous. 

However, I don’t have enough hours in the day to always be promoting through Facebook and Instagram. Not even just with the hours of teaching, but also with producing music and art, let alone promoting, setting up exhibits, and domestic responsibilities with owning a house. I would need to clone myself. If I had three of me, I’d be happier. 

How beneficial is social media for sharing your art? 

It’s so beneficial. I don’t use it enough. If I had less to do, I would be spending a lot more time doing certain kinds of promotion on it. 

Luckily for the media, most of my friends found out I wrote a book called I Paint the Moon through Facebook via their friends. I didn’t even post about it. 

Do you collaborate with other art professors at Centenary?

Nope, only because we each do our own things. I bump into them and talk to them. Collaboration would mean setting up exhibits. 

Essentially, that’s what I do with the library staff here. I talk to Rita Keene, the Library’s user experience manager, about what I’m doing and I give her my press releases to send out. She puts them on the electronic bulletin board and sends it out to the University’s web page. Then, [Van Alstyne] gives me the green light. 

What advice do you have for aspiring artists?

Stay grounded. Don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Following your bliss is everything. Always keep an eye towards income. 

What is something surprising that most people don’t know about you?

On campus, most people don’t know I’m a musician. They think I’m just an artist with shows in the library. 

This speaks to why I produce a pamphlet. Most people pick it up and take it home, but they don’t necessarily read it. I’m constantly surprising people. People have to be riveted by something. 

I also have two books coming out. One is based on a mentor of mine that I put together called The Artistry of Don Comet. It’s 170 pages. Probably around the first of the year, I plan to inaugurate the book through the Paterson Museum where he was well known, and I’ll be having an exhibit of his work here next semester.

I Paint the Moon, my book about the full moon series, also came out three years ago. A copy of it is in Taylor Memorial Library. 

Is there anything you would like to add?

A retrospective is a window for the public– who might know something about the artist– to have the opportunity to see some very early stuff and give them a sense of the artist’s origins. The question should arise, Is that where they came from? They should think, Wow, their work has really changed, which it should. Wow, they certainly got better, looser, have more control, and more focus. 

I’m really happy to show work that I basically wouldn’t put out there commercially. It would be inferior, but I find it intriguing like an anthropologist would to check those relics out, see what I was capable of at the time. 

I think it’s really important. I know a lot of artists are very gun shy about showing anything that isn’t top quality. I’m just happy to let it all hang out. 

When you write poetry, for example, you say to yourself, not this one. Ooh, that one. Then, three months later, you read one you thought was meh, and think, how come I didn’t see that? 

You should never diss what you’ve created. Keep it in a box and come back to it sometime. You’ll see it differently. It’s very important to have your own archive. 

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See Coco’s retrospective in Taylor Memorial Library, pick up his book, and keep an eye out for his upcoming events and installment of The Golden Dome Series next semester.