Joel C. Sheesley

Joel C. Sheesley graduated form Syracuse University with a BFA and graduated with an MFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Denver. He retired in 2016 with the rank of Professor after 42 years of teaching art at Wheaton College for a total of 45 years of professional work as an exhibiting artist and professor of art. Joel is a 45 year resident of DuPage County.  Now retired from teaching, he continues as a Professor Emeritus, still painting, and speaking.

 In addition, to his 42 year as a Professor of Art at Wheaton College, Joel has a 45-year record of exhibitions, lectures, etc. in local, regional, and national high caliber art venues. He has spearheaded unique exhibitions for the following organizations: Northern Illinois Food Bank, All Souls Anglican Church, the Wheaton Park District, and The Conservation Foundation.

Joel achieved excellence in his field at an early age and has been recognized/honored both nationally and internationally in the field of visual arts. Joel has an extensive list of solo or invitational group painting exhibitions at various art institutions in: New York City, Chicago, Laguna Beach, CA, Kalamazoo, MI, and Syracuse, NY. Over the course of his career, his art has been displayed and he has lectured, written, or taught in more than 13 of out United States as well as in Canada and Nicaragua.

 Joel has had an important impact on the Arts in the Fox Valley area. For 45 years, Joel Sheesley’s paintings have brought attention to suburban, urban, and rural landscape, first in DuPage County, then Kane, Kendall and LaSalle Counties in Illinois. His work had been exhibited locally in Chicago galleries and also in commercial and institutional art venues in 13 states including: New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kansas and California.

 In 2007, Valparaiso University published a 99 page retrospective catalog in conjunction with the exhibition “Domestic Vision: Twenty-Five Years of the Art of Joel Sheesley”. In 2015 the Wheaton Park District published “Lincoln Marsh Journal: Landscape the Knowledge Mystery”, a 130 page catalog of Sheesley’s painting in Lincoln Marsh, a natural area in Wheaton, IL.

 In 2018, The Conservation Foundation (TCF) published “A Fox River Testimony”, a 155-page catalog of Sheesley’s paintings of the Fox River Valley. All of this work, and that previously noted, calls attention to and celebrates the varied life and landscape of the Fox Valley area. During the years 2017 through 2019, Sheesley has worked in conjunction with The Conservation Foundation and gave a series of formal and informal talks to promote the work of TCF and its mission to save land and rivers in the Fox Valley region.