Josephine Merck
Josephine (Josie) Merck is a painter and environmentalist. She was born in Canada, moved to New Jersey, and then the family migrated for her father’s work to Mexico and Brazil. The rural landscape and village culture in New Jersey were always ingredients in her parents’ vision of family living. The ruin of a large brick house from the 1920s in Somerset County, N.J. was resurrected by the family in the 1950s. The house came complete with unrealized blueprints and landscape plans by the Innocenti landscape architecture firm, which proved fascinating to her as a nine-year-old. Later in Maine she learned about Beatrice Farrand’s designs from a dear older friend who maintained something of the original Farrand “bones” of her family’s old summer house.
Josie’s earliest painting memories were with her maternal step grandfather Edward H. Bennett, a city planner who co-authored the 1909 Plan of Chicago with Daniel H. Burnham. Her art education began at the Museum of Modern Art summer school as a young teenager, then Sarah Lawrence College, and later Yale School of Art with a Master of Fine Arts in painting.
As with Cornelia Oberlander, Josie has long been interested in how a building relates to its setting. Her lifetime fascination with Block Island and its vernacular architecture and open, coastal landscape led her to the recently dismantled and repurposed building next door to her in Cos Cob, CT, where she created the "LOST & FOUND" Art Lab art residency. The project sought to recycle and repurpose many of the materials found on site from wood planking to glacial debris and make them visible and integral to guests and visitors.