Our Mission

The Whalen Legacy initiative was started as part of the Niagara Art Trail's efforts to promote & preserve art in the Niagara Region of New York State.

The seed was planted in 2009. After several years of printing reproductions for Joe, he approached us to help him publish a coffee table book of some of his paintings. The idea was to select 100 paintings from over the decades and include titles, media, size and year.

This proved to be quite a task, not due to the lack of works by Joe, because heaven knows just how many he created throughout his lifetime, but rather acquiring images of the original works which were of course scattered around the world in private collections.

We needed high quality images of the works to be included. Many digitized images were already in our portfolio obtained through photographing and scanning artwork for prints, posters, marketing, greeting cards and the like. that was a start, but since Joe had specific works in mind, we had only scratched the surface of reaching the goal of 100 paintings. Additional images were obtained from slides, old photos of works, digital photos of varying quality, and of course more photography and scanning of originals, prints and often very rough copies; sometimes as small as a thumbnail photo proof.

After much effort and a lot of editing, we were ready to place the images. Another problem with not having access to the originals was being sure of the information to be captioned beneath each photo. If you ever spent much time with Joe, you know what a memory he had, but some of the sizes and year produced were probably rough guesses. Titles may have changed a bit as well. The project made it through to completion and was released in January 2010 to coincide with a show at the Kenan Center.

The next project had similar challenges. It was a 16 month calendar (September 2012-December 2013) to be released in the Summer of 2012. It contained 16 paintings plus one on the front cover. Each one selected by Joe. At the release of the calendar, he spoke about why he selected each work and in true Joe Whalen fashion shared stories about the subject, colorful history or personal meaning behind each month's painting.

At this point two things were obvious.

1.) Joe produced a mountain of work over seven decades

2.) Cataloging Whalen's portflio was a worthwhile endeavor which would guarentee that it would be preserved and shared long after he was gone.

What we fondly called "The Whalen Project" was born. The idea was to use all resources already in Joe's possesion (slides, photos, etc) along with borrowed work from private owners to digitize and catalogue good quality images. Although we called it the Whalen Project we felt (and still do feel) that the same concept should be applied to other artists in the area. Lockport and Niagara County has a long history and lineage of artists and the earlier we begin to catalogue their work the less cahnce there will be later to have to recoup work from seven decades as was the case with Whalen's work.

More to come...