Joseph Sheppard

Joseph Sheppard was born in Owings Mills, Maryland. He attended the Maryland Institute (now known as MICA), from 1948 to 1952, where he studied with Jacques Maroger. From 1956 to 1957, he was artist-in-residence at Dickinson College, Carlise, PA. In 1957 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study in Florence, Italy. From 1960 to 1975 he taught painting, anatomy, and life drawing at MICA. Sheppard has been commissioned to do monumental sculpture, murals, and other public work. Most notably, in Baltimore alone, he is responsible for the bronze of famous baseball player Brooks Robinson (2011), the Pope John Paul II Monument at the Basilica (2008), and the Holocaust Memorial sculpture (1988). Among several murals in the city are the seven large paintings in the Balto City Police Dept (1972), and most recently Schaefer’s Splash at the National Aquarium (2019). In 1987 he executed murals that completely covered the ballroom of the Palmer House in Chicago. His portraits include President George H.W. Bush, Senator Barbara Mikulski, Cardinals Lawrence Shehan, Wm H. Keeler, and John P. Foley. Both portraits of Cardinals Shehan and Foley are in the Vatican collection, as well as his portrait of Pope Benedict XVI. He has been awarded numerous honors, including the Gold Medal of Honor (1994) from the National Sculpture Society, the XVIII Premio Internationale Pietrasanta e la Vesilia nel Mondo (2008), and the XXVII Premio Internationale “San Francico e Chiara d’Assisi” (2019). Recently in the US, he was awarded Sports Artist of the Year 2015 by the United States Sports Academy. In addition, his work can be found in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, the Butler Institute of Art in Ohio, the Davenport Municipal Art Gallery in Iowa, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, the Midwest Museum of American Art in Indiana, the Arizona Museum of Art, the Brookgreen Gardens Museum of American Sculpture in SC, the National Art Museum of Sports in Indiana, the National Portrait Gallery in Wasington, DC, the Museo Dei Bozzetti in Pietrasanta, Italy, and the Consiglio della Toscana, Florence, Italy.