Joel Coplin hitched a ride in the back of a horse van heading to NYC in 1977 to study with Frank Mason at The Art Students’ League of New York, and in the summer in Stowe, Vermont. After completion of his eight years of training with Frank Mason in the classical arts, including the methods, materials, and techniques of the old masters, he and his wife, Jo-Ann Lowney, moved in the early 1980s to a historic artist colony near the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.
His work has appeared in many group exhibitions, including Southwest 96 at the Museum of Fine Art, Santa Fe. New Mexico. The 2003 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art in Tucson Arizona, In April of 2012 his work was selected for an exhibition at the Udinotti Museum of Figurative Art in Paradise Valley Arizona as well as most recently in July of 2015 his painting The Fight In the Garden was included in the 79th mid-year exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown Ohio.
His work is in the collections of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the Tucson Art Museum, the Plotkin Museum of Judaica, Sky Harbor Airport Museum, and the Phoenix City Hall where his 6’ x 25’ mural, Metroasis, a history of the City of Phoenix, is permanently installed.
