The Artsy Vanguard 2025: Melissa Joseph

The nomadic New York gallery REGULARNORMAL mounted a breakout presentation highlighting this body of work at NADA Miami in 2021. An ensuing surge of interest in Joseph’s practice has yielded high-profile residencies, gallery shows, and attention from institutions like the ICA Miami and the Brooklyn Museum. This December, Joseph will return to Miami for her first showing in the main section of Art Basel, with the tastemaking gallery Charles Moffett.

In the 2021 NADA presentation, viewers were hooked by one work in particular: a felt portrait of Joseph’s uncle, wearing a white undershirt and conspicuous crucifix, with a beverage in hand. “So many people were like, ‘Oh my God, that could be my uncle,’” she recalled. The response was indicative of how Joseph’s work walks the line between the personal and the universal. Its subject matter is plainly biographical, derived from family photos and documentation from Joseph’s daily life. But the soft tactility of the work fosters a sense of comfort and intimacy that, perhaps, offers viewers permission to insert themselves. For Joseph, this slipperiness between the artist’s and audience’s perspectives boils down to “how we’re so much more the same than we are different, as a species.”

That belief—in our essential alikeness—stems from Joseph’s mixed-heritage upbringing. Her father immigrated in the 1970s from India to the United States, where he met her mother, an Irish Catholic from Pittsburgh. Joseph grew up in St. Marys, Pennsylvania, an overwhelmingly white Rust Belt town whose camouflage-and-flannel culture she says she still identifies with, despite having moved away years ago. Even though cultural resources were sparse, Joseph had a creative childhood, taking piano lessons from local nuns and portrait drawing classes alongside her father, K. C. Joseph. A surgeon by trade, the elder Joseph had an artistic spirit, and for years made surrealistic collages for his patients using photos of their organs. (In 2022, his daughter curated a show of this work at Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn.)

Despite their creative kinship, Joseph’s father wanted her to follow in his professional footsteps. She went to Barnard College in New York on a pre-med track before transferring to NYU to pursue an individualized course of study in “some art, physics, literature—it’s kind of just study whatever you want,” she said. After more degrees, in textiles and then education, she taught art for nearly a decade at schools across the globe—from Italy and Switzerland to Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, Ohio.

In a market that seems increasingly fixated on youth, Joseph, who is 43, is leaning into the advantages of her more circuitous path to full-time artmaking. “It gave me time to cook,” she said. “I don’t think, if I had gotten my MFA at 25, that I would have had the life experience to say anything particularly interesting.”

When she ultimately did decide to pursue her MFA, it was due to one of those life experiences: the death of her father, in 2016. It was a pivotal moment, the kind that prompts you, she explained, to “take stock in where you are, and then figure out if you want to continue on that path.” She didn’t. She enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), intending to make work with encaustic, a kind of painting that uses melted wax mixed with pigment. Only upon her arrival in Philadelphia did Joseph learn that students weren’t allowed to have heating elements in their studios, foiling her plans.

Still, she made the most of her stint at PAFA, where the MFA program at the time was run by Didier William—a Haitian artist whose practice, like Joseph’s, is concerned with family and diasporic identity. Her experiments with felt only came later, during a residency at New York’s Textile Arts Center that she undertook in 2019. She started out with wet felting, a process that involves using water and friction to bind wool fibers together. Later, she took up needle felting, a dry method in which fibers are meshed together by repeatedly stabbing them with a special needle.

Joseph has applied her signature technique at different scales: During a residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, earlier this year, she produced Indian Dirty Dancing (2024), a monumental, 9-by-12-foot work based on an image of her parents at a backyard party. Other works are more intimate, analogous to the dimensions of family photo albums—like the small tondos she produced for “Irish Exit,” her 2023 solo show at the New York gallery Margot Samel.

Joseph’s affection for objects is palpable. She carries personal talismans: rosary beads from her father, and a wedding ring inherited from her mother, who passed away earlier this year. Her work is both painterly and sculptural, often employing flea market and junkyard treasures—furniture, vintage first-aid kits, old pipes—as three-dimensional frames. Rusted metals are a favorite; they evoke the post-industrial landscape in which Joseph grew up.

She also uses personally significant objects as motifs that she hunts down in her source imagery. For her solo presentation with Margot Samel at this year’s Liste Art Fair Basel, for example, Joseph mined her archive for images featuring accordions, inspired by her own history playing the instrument as well as Esteban “Steve” Jordan, a Tejano accordion player whose legacy she discovered while working in San Antonio.

While needle felting is most associated with fuzzy animal figurines, Joseph’s rigorous approach pushes the technique to its limits. “I’m always looking for artists who are developing a unique language,” said Larry Ossei-Mensah, the curator who selected Joseph to participate in the Artpace residency, in a phone interview. “I was just taken by that ingenuity and unique use of material.” During the afternoon I spent in her studio, Joseph offered to show me how to felt, and I struggled to eke out a 5-by-7-inch abstract sky composition. Whether by design or not, the exercise impressed upon me the difficulty of precise markmaking with felt. (Joseph, ever the art teacher, was generous with her praise.)

Recently, the art world has been increasingly attentive to fiber-based practices, long associated with craft, fine art’s oft-dismissed underling. But despite the reappraisal, Joseph is underwhelmed by what she sees as a lack of “rigorous curatorial premises” around this work. “It’s not just like, ‘Oh, look, both of these things are soft,’” she said, with a note of exasperation. “There’s more of a connection between jacquard weaving and computer art than there is between jacquard and [felting].”

Throughout our conversation, Joseph is remarkably clear-eyed and candid about the problems that plague the industry in which she’s found herself. Another of these is the erasure that women artists face as they enter middle age. “Women tend to disappear at around 50, and then they have a moment in their eighties, right before they die,” she said, noting her sense that she was racing to rack up accomplishments while the market is still interested.

Still, Joseph is overwhelmingly grateful to have found her true vocation. “You live 40 years feeling like a shoe that’s on the wrong foot,” she explained. “And then, all of a sudden, it’s on the right foot.”

The Artsy Vanguard 2025