When Joseph and Donna McElroy moved into an office near mine in 2010 my reaction was much the same as Jane Foster on her first trip to Asgard, astonishment: the duo were larger than life, colorful, garrulous, eye catching and imposing. They were, in a word, different.
And I wanted to know Joseph and Donna, I wanted to know exactly who these guys were. Actors? Rock stars? Bankrobbers? I wanted to be their friend and I became their friend even though what got me to know them at first was being told the company they owned, Corporate Performance artist, specialized in managing websides and I owned a website that really needed managing!
I went to visit and to ask their opinion and to see if maybe I could hire them to tune up the website. They were very sweet, not as scary as I expected, and flat out not interested. For one thing, I couldn’t afford them!
But a friendship was forged nevertheless and whenever I had a major major problem , Joseph would bail me out and still I pursued them (not unlike the way Joseph pursued Donna) , and finally they agreed to partner up with rock nyc , and have been the best partners one could possibly hope for.
At first it was a little difficult to figure out the structure of their marriage. Joseph is such an imposing man, he takes up any room, so the assumption is that he was the Chief Executive, but the more you go to know, the more of a tradeoff appeared: they played together like hand in glove, one leading then the other, like a symbiosis, two people, one mind.
While at first my dealings were mostly with Joseph, when the McElroy’s asked me to help curate the “Muse And Music” series in March 2011, I found myself working more closely with Donna and I adored her. She was both no nonsense and caring at the same time, plus she was well organized and could execute any plan Joseph came up with on a dime. And she would have to. It is like Joseph had all these dreams and Donna made them come true.
Fiercely protective and intensely loving of her husband, it was Donna who insisted people refer to her husband as “Joseph” and not “Joe” and it was Donna who chose their style. The two worked on Art Installations together. I once went to an Art Fair in Patterson, New Jersey,a lovely day that included Donna and I walking to a beautiful waterfall together, and my having the time to really study their art. I walked away with a deep appreciation of their gifts: the colors had the heighten glow of Impressionists with the towering optimism of an American can do. They were so overwhelmingly positive whatever the subject matter might be. Their paintings were so big and crazy they took your breath away and made you feel a sort of completion.
This was the essence of Donna transmogrified, a perfect American sense of possibilities, of a life filled with possibilities, of the possibility of infinite love and harmony among two people and the world they melded in their image.
People don’t win or lose a battle with cancer any more than they win or lose a battle with life; if that was the case, we would all die losers. Cancer didn’t beat Donna, cancer didn’t dim her indomitable spirit; she didn’t cower or rollover. On Christmas Eve, as ill as she was, Donna went to the movies, the last time I saw her was at the Vampire Weekend private concert and a week before that with Tomas Doncker, John Pasquale and Joseph at an Italian restaurant in Soho. Donna didn’t stop, she didn’t give up, she didn’t roll away and in the end she donated her remains to science. Donna beat cancer so bad, it didn’t know what hit it.
On behalf of rock nyc, we offer our condolences to Joseph, her mother and her sisters and brothers. But we are selfish and we also need to console ourselves at this enormous loss. Nothing could beat Donna but nothing can save us from this loss.