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Joy Wulke left this earth a better place on February 25, 2014.
Joy A Wulke
Obituary
1948 - 2014
Joy Wulke, environmental artist, educator and public art advocate, died on February 25, 2014 at Connecticut Hospice in Branford after a seven-month battle with cancer. She was 65.
Born in San Bernardino, CA on May 23, 1948 and raised in Long Beach, Joy earned a BA in Architecture from Washington State University in 1970 and a Masters of Environmental Design from Yale in 1974. She was an American Institute of Architects Associate member, the owner of Joy Wulke Studio of Art & Design and founder of Projects for a New Millennium (Projects2K), a nonprofit organization dedicated to the fusion of art and science as means of ecological stewardship. She had held teaching positions at Yale, RISD, Montana State and the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, and was a continuing Advisory Council member for the School of Architecture and Design at Washington State.
Joy said that she "thrived on collaboration and community interaction, and strove to create works of wonder". In her early career she specialized in fabric playscape designs, bringing teachers, parents and children together through the power of creative thinking. She continued to focus on educational and collaborative art throughout her career, creating art and science programs at the Peabody Museum and Barnard Environmental Magnet in New Haven, CT.
Joy's later photographic and sculptural works explored the environment and light as both materials and subjects. A collection of her studies on abandoned schoolhouses and landscapes in Montana, entitled "The Great Alone", are in the permanent collection at Yale's Beineke Library. In her public art works, she manipulated light through fabric, steel, glass and LED, transforming their surrounding spaces. From the atrium of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center to the façade of the Stamford Metro-North Railroad Station, Joy conveyed a sense of beauty and place. Her largest scale projects, multisensory performances with Projects2k, filled the Stony Creek Quarry in CT with light, lasers, sound and fire.
Joy's work has appeared in The New York Times, New Media Art, Interiors, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, Sculpture and LA Architect. She received three Connecticut Arts Fellowships, a New England Foundation on the Arts Artist Grant and a 2013 Arts Award from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. Her sculptural commissions span the country and include work for the Louisiana World's Fair, the World Trade Center, the Lincoln Center Film Forum and the American Bar Association.
Just as her love of the water and the earth inspired her artistic collaborators, her creativity, passion, grace and fabulous cooking enriched the lives of her friends and family. Joy will be sorely missed by her husband David Connell of Stony Creek, CT, her daughter Gioia Connell of New Haven, CT, her sister Janice Wulke of Long Beach, CA, her Cousin Marleta Warneke Garner of Los Osos, CA and countless friends. A memorial is planned for early summer near her home in Branford, CT.
Published on NYTimes.com from Mar. 3 to Mar. 4, 2014
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Linda Short (Pacholl)
Oh my, just logged on to Email, and got the shock of my life. Joy Wulke, what can I say, "but poetry in motion".
Joy was a wonderful, kind, talented and beautiful person. She inspired many a person who were in classes with her. She will be missed. I am sadden for our loss and for those who knew her and for her family and friends.
Rest in peace.
Linda Short Pacholl
Margo Morgan (Gripp)
As I scrolled down on the In Memory to the list to the W's, I am taken aback at how many of our classmates are gone. This past week we lost Joy Wulke, and a great loss it is to us, her family, her colleagues and to the art community.
We hadn't seen each other in years, but always kept up with Christmas cards and an occasional e-mail, and then our friend Sandy Weeks-Brangan (she lived on Petaluma in the next block up from me) got 5 of us Emerson/Stanford girls together for our 60th birthdays in San Francisco 6 years ago. It was Pam Haney-Satinover (she also lived on Petaluma across the street from Sandy), Barbara Halby-Houston (she lived on the corner of Ladoga and Spring) Joy, and me. We had a fabulous time and renewed our friendships like barely any time had passed. We vowed to do it again for our 65th, and planned to meet at Barbara's mountain house in Oregon last year, but 4 days before the get-together, Joy e-mailed us to say she had been diagnosed with possible Lymphoma and couldn't make the reunion. We were all sad, but moved ahead with our plans to get together and promised to have a do-over when Joy got well, because we just knew she would! It seemed that she was really responding well to treatment, and was planning to come to Florida in April ... I was going to meet her and visit. Then someone posted on Facebook the other day that she had died. I was in shock, and so are the other girls. I had really bonded with Joy again, and loved her so much that I'm just devastated by her death. Rest in peace, Joy, I will always love and miss you, my friend.
Left to right: Joy, Pam, Me, Sandy Barbara
Sharon Weeks (Maupin)
Nice tribute to Joy. Steve I am glad you posted "The Warrior Goddess" because it really did suit Joy.