Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Drawing, Fabrication
Website: joemelamed.com
Joe Melamed is a sculptor who lives and works in Oakland, California. Since 2012 he has kept a studio at The Dome, the artist live/work community at 951 62nd Street in Oakland that the ceramic sculptor Peter Voulkos founded in 1976 inside a former dome-shaped food-processing plant. The Dome houses sixteen active artists’ studios alongside a performance space and an archive of twentieth-century ceramics, and Melamed is listed among its resident artists together with Bella Feldman, Clay Jensen, Maya Kabat, JP Long, Megan Mirro, Joseph Slusky, Laura Van Duren and Leah Virsik.
Melamed’s practice has developed largely outside the commercial gallery system, shown mainly through The Dome’s studio openings and through his own website, which he titles simply “things i’ve made.” He organizes the work there by material and method rather than by exhibition or date — paper sculpture, plastic sculpture, drawing sculpture, furniture sculpture, drawing, sewing and fabrication — a taxonomy that reflects a practice moving freely between fine art objects and commissioned, functional making.
Alongside his studio practice, Melamed has worked since 2018 as program and operations manager at the KADIST Art Foundation in San Francisco, a role that places him inside the Bay Area’s contemporary art infrastructure while his own work continues in Oakland.
Melamed’s sculpture is built from an unusually wide range of materials and fabrication techniques. Green Man Hiding (2014), a 75-by-40-by-15-inch figure shown at The Dome, combines urethane resin and urethane foam with steel, canvas, acrylic and aluminum — a layering of cast, welded and stretched materials that is characteristic of his approach. Elsewhere the register shifts entirely: the paper sculptures are lightweight, quickly read constructions of animals and figures — crows, seagulls, pigeons, squirrels, an albino turkey — while the “drawing sculpture” works translate the line of a drawing into three dimensions in pieces such as relief boat, trash cans and dancer at rest.
Recurring across the work is an affection for ordinary, overlooked subjects: street pigeons and trash cans, dogs, people hiding, figures talking on the phone, boats. The titles are lowercase and deadpan, and the humor is dry rather than satirical. His furniture and fabrication work sits on the same continuum — a Covid-19 rocking chair made from a found rocking chair with a pleather seat and hand-carved detailing, an ouch! bench, a boat-shaped garden gate, a painting storage rack built for another artist. The distinction between the sculpture and the useful object is deliberately soft, and the making, in both cases, is hands-on and materially omnivorous.
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