Contact info:

Email: cavaglass@gmail.com

​Tel/text: (001) 212-925-2377

Facebook: Joseph Cavalieri
Instagram: joseph_cavalieri_glass

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Storytime

A collection of stories from my life.

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Taking Chances 

    Once upon in the city of Melbourne in the country of Australia my host showed me a stack of R. Crumb comic books he had collected in the 1970s. I always was a fan of R. Crumb, so I took some high res photos and designed some concepts using these images in a stained glass setting.

    Mr. Crumb lives in the south of France, and at that time was in his 70s. Somehow I found his email and sent an email showing my digital sketches, with a note asking for permission. I wasn't expecting a response right away, but the next day he wrote giving me permission, saying he would not charge or ask for a work. He wished me luck and said "go out and make a lot of money." 

    Now my challenge was to replicate his crosshatching pen and ink illustrations on paper to using enamel paints with a fine paintbrush on glass. With much concentration I finished six works based on his work. They were shown and sold out at SOFA (Sculpture Objects Functional Art and Design) exhibition in Chicago, where I was representing UrbanGlass.

    I recently emailed Mr. Crumb with more designs, which he approved!

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Enid, Lydia, and the Orchid 

    Once upon a time, in the aughts, in the city of Manhattan, I had a sweet tabby cat named Lidia.

    Lydia was found as a kitten by my boss Greg Monfries when I was working at People magazine. He arrived one morning in a panic at our office after finding Lydia and six of her siblings in a cardboard box on the street near his home in Brooklyn. He needed to find a new home for them immediately, so me and my partner decided to adopt. Lidia happily lived with us for about 5 years, and when that (human) fairy tale relationship ended, I was here new single parent. 
    A year later asked my downstairs neighbor Enid to stop up to feed Lidia when I was traveling. She did a perfect job so I decided to give Enid a gift of a beautiful flowering orchid plant as a thank you. She was over the top, and loved the gift. 

     One bit of information I neglected to tell Enid was the plant was plastic. Dear reader, have you seen artificial plants recently? They look more natural than living plants.

    Over the next few weeks I received texts from Enid saying how amazed she was that the plant was still flowering. She was proud that she was watering it just the right amount for the flowers to survive for such a long time. 

    Three months later, when I ran into Enid in the hallway, I finally had to confess. She was surprised and I could see a bit confused. 

    Now, Lydia has passed but Enid is still my neighbor. We often carry UPS and FedEx boxes up from our lobby for each other, and when we do meet in the hallway there is no mentions of Lydia or the orchid.  

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Flounder in the Basement

Once upon a time a very strong hurricane decided to visit the New York area, including my neighborhood of the East Village. Her name was Sandy, and she was mad as hell. At the height of her anger my neighbor Ken and I descended four flights to see our front stoop steps covered with two feet of water flowing in from the east river, and a waterfall filling our basement. A day later all the basements for blocks were flooded, and the light were out for about a week.

    We did have a warning so I took some items, including my bicycle, out of our basement the day before, but many neighbors didn't take any items, so when the storm ended it was like a soup of soggy boxes floating in our basement.

    To our surprise, while the waters were pumped out of the basement onto the sidewalk, we found a dead flounder. It must have swam from the east river, been caught in the waves and sucked down, then died in our basement. 

    I decided to make a stained glass panel about this event, and a few months later sold it to a couple in Brooklyn, who totally related to the story. The art was fun, and had moving parts on the top of the frame, that made elements move inside the work.

    You may think this is the end of the story, but about a year later in a board meeting a neighbor told the group he was missing his taxidermy flounder. At this point I had to decided to tell my clients the full story. Perhaps they might be upset that the story wasn't true, but they happily accepted explanation, considering it a new chapter to the story of the flounder in the basement.

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Cheerios

Once upon a time a there was an era in New York, probably in the whole of the USA and the world, where bleaching your hair was just starting to get popular. For me this was 1992. I was sharing a brownstone in Brooklyn with a cute lesbian, who had an even cuter boxer. She got her hair bleached at Astor Barbers, and convinced me to do the same. Two incidents happened while I was a blonde. The first was taking an elevator at work, when a fake blonds entered on one floor, and then a second fake blond on the next. We all had a chuckle 

     Thee nice thing about having curly dark hair that was bleached, is when it starts to grow out it looked just like cheerios on my head.

   The second highlight was in my Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. I was on my way to the subway, donning my fancy cheerios-do, when a car passed by and a lovely black lady yelled at the top of her lungs "I love your hair." 

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Upcoming stories:

Red tailed hawk eating pigeon 

Blond curls and woman in car

Does stepping on tree roots hurts trees

Scotland pasta meal

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