Exhibit Celebrates The Varied Art Of The Late Joyce Aaron

ORLEANS – Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” 

Joyce Aaron was that other person.
 
From ice cream cups to rusty items to the tiny white plastic tags that fasten bags of bread, all of them held significance to Joyce, the longtime Orleans resident and local eco art pioneer who died in December at the age of 95.
 
“She would collect caps to jugs, plastic jugs, all different colors,” said Joyce’s daughter, Betsy Aaron. “Gun shells. She just had a big jar and started putting them in.”
 
One of the many pieces decorating the inside of the community center at 44 Main St. last week was ‘Shells on the Beach,’ in which Joyce used some of those spent gun shells she collected to stunning effect. 
 
“Everything deserved a second life or a re-creation,” Suzanne Holmes, Betsy’s sister, said of her mother’s work.
 
And so it goes that a collection of Joyce’s work also got a second life of its own last week. An exhibit, “A Lifetime of Art by Joyce Aaron,” was held at the community center last weekend as a kick-off to the Orleans Cultural District’s annual Arts Week festivities, which run through April 26. The exhibit showcased a variety of Joyce’s work in many forms, from found art pieces to oil paintings and many projects in between.
 
Born in Worcester in 1929, Joyce taught kindergarten in Worcester and Cranston, R.I., early in her career, according to her obituary. She and her husband retired in the mid-1980s to Orleans, where Joyce lived until her passing.
 
Joyce was a child during the Great Depression, which Betsy said could explain her affinity for collecting and saving the many things she found.
  
“I don’t even know if that was an influence on her, I gather it was,” she said. “But she loved refinishing things. She’d find things on the side of the road and turn them into something beautiful.”
 
As part of the exhibit, the community center walls were canvassed by art of all persuasions. Some pieces made creative use of teabags, while on the opposite wall hung paintings Joyce made in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. There were sketches and drawings, and even samples of her own homemade paper.
 
“She did everything,” Suzanne said. “She needed to try everything.”

For JoAnna Keeley of the cultural district, a series of pieces designed around the word “No” left a strong impression.
 
“There’s the whimsy, and then there’s the mathematical," she said of the pieces.
 
A statement from Joyce prior to her passing that was shared at last weekend’s exhibit shed some light on her artistic motivations. “My paintings are meant to be unique, decorative, and timeless as well as thought provoking,” it read in part. “I try to find continuity between the past, present and future.”
 
“I think what she tried to do was make sense of her weird life and the world,” Betsy said. “A lot of (her pieces) are trying to organize things in a certain way to make sense of it.”
 
Beyond creating art of her own, Joyce was first and foremost an appreciator and educator. She taught decorative art from her home studio for several years, and for 30 years worked with the Cape Cod Museum of Fine Arts, where she served as the museum’s first docent. She was also a docent at the Worcester Museum of Art, Betsy said.
 
After Joyce’s passing, one of her friends mentioned to Betsy the possibility of using the community center to showcase her late mother’s work. 
 
“I contacted the cultural district, and by (chance) spoke with JoAnna Keeley,” Betsy said. “And she said ‘Oh, maybe we could do something for Arts Week.”
 
Betsy said she and her family have spent considerable time in recent months going through Joyce’s possessions. Through that process, they came across hundreds of different pieces and projects that their mother had created over the course of her life. 
 
“There were over 500 things easily, and there’s still more,” Besty said. “It was such a heartfelt process. I’m feeling like I got to see another part of my mom.”
 
For Betsy, there are stories behind many of the pieces. There are the small notepads that her mother drew in the last years of her life, as well as the homemade bookmarks that she crafted using the sticks from yogurt pops.  Joyce’s work has been exhibited locally in exhibits, banks and libraries, while one of her paintings was also put on display inside the State House in Boston. 

Betsy and Suzanne said while they were aware of their mother’s notoriety in local art circles, they didn’t realize just how much until after her passing. 
 
“It wasn’t until after the fact that people would say things to me about my mom and her work,” Betsy said. “They’d come up to me and I’d explain who she was and they’d say ‘Joyce Aaron? Yeah, I loved her work!’”
 
Yet for all the acclaim Joyce’s work earned her, none of it fazed her, her daughters said. Art was something she did largely for herself, not necessarily for praise or recognition. But Betsy said the exhibit, which ran Friday through Easter Sunday, was not just a celebration of art, but of her mother’s life. For Joyce, there was little separating one from the other.
 
“For me, this is a chance for her work to live on,” she said. “It’s giving credit. She was so humble, and I don’t think she knew how much talent she had.”
 
Suzanne, meanwhile, said the exhibit also was a way of recognizing the influence and impact that her mother had on her own life. Through her mother, she said she learned “how to see the world through different eyes, the eyes of an artist.”

“That's a lifelong gift,” she said.

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com