Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher who sometimes writes poetry and movie reviews. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in many on line magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholias Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, the DMQ Review,Broadsided and Hotmetalpress. Over the years he has received three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowship, two Pollock-Krasner grants and most recently in 2004 received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn

The earliest piece of existing sculpture that I did dates from 1958. I was very young. The piece is made of white interlocking plastic building blocks that children at a certain age always play with. For me it was more than just play. The piece has some similarities to my present concerns. It looks like a building or a structure or a ruin. I glued the individual blocks together. Even at this early stage I was concerned with making a permanent work of art. I found this lost and forgotten piece in 1971 at the home of my parents in a box of old things of mine that my mother had kept for all those years. The piece was broken into four sections, but it was not difficult to repair because the parts fitted together like a puzzle. I remember doing this piece but its a vague remembrance.
In 1968 I started to fill small black sketchbooks with collages. I thought of them as intimate objects to be looked at by one person at a time. I never ripped out pages. I did these books for about a year when I decided I had
accomplished at that time what I wanted to do with collage. In early 1969 I wanted to expand my ideas of collage, to break through the paper and get to the other side. It was at this point that I started my work involving small scale
sculpture & miniature environments & landscapes.
My training was in commercial art & advertising. I began working in the advertising field in 1966 upon completing a 2 year course at New York City Community College as it was then known. This training was basically useless as they were teaching us techniques & skills that my have been useful in the 1940's & 50's. In any event I had little trouble in finding jobs, however these jobs depended on skills that I really didn't have, and my heart was not really in the ad game. I wanted to be an artist. At night I took drawing and illustration classes at The School Of Visual Arts, which made me want to be an artist more than ever. Finally in 1967 I stopped working in advertising and from that time on I have devoted my life to being an artist.
Growing up in New York gave me easy access to all the museums and at an early age I started to go to The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum Of Natural History, The MOMA and The Whitney when it was still attached to the MOMA. I was particularly attracted to the large dioramas at the natural history museum,not for the history they told,but for how they told that history. I was fascinated by the artificial landscapes & how they were made. At the same time I
was also seeing the great works of modern art. The one work that stands out as having an impact on me as a child was Ernst's "Two Children Are Threatened By A Nightingale" which left a lasting impression on me because of Ernst's use
of strange perspective, bright almost acidy coloration and the three-dimensional miniaturization of a gate and house. Some other influences were amusement parks, notably Steeplechase Park, movies, Times Sq. & the artists Joseph Cornell & Louise Nevelson. Knowing their work from an early age was an education. Seeing what they (and others) had done with assemblage was inspiring and me me realise that although their accomplishments were magnificent there was still room for an original new voice to be heard.
The 1st box I did was in 1969 and was made of cardboard which was completely