Joan Landis Bahm

Joan Bahm died at her home in Albuquerque, NM surrounded by her family. She was married to Darwin Bahm for 64 years, until his death in 2024 at the age of 95. Joan is survived by her daughters Sarah Furlong, Rebecca Singband (David), grandchildren Nikola Singband and Daisy Furlong.

Born in Cleveland, OH, just before the Great Depression, Joan spent much of her childhood traveling the country by Airstream trailer with her parents. In 1950, she graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art with a bachelor of fine arts degree.

In 1951, Joan moved to New York, settling in the West Village. One of her first jobs was at the avant-garde Four Seasons Bookstore on Greenwich Avenue where she waited on such literary stars and painters as e.e. cummings, James Merrill, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow and Jackson Pollock.

Joan spent five months traveling around Europe in 1954 and toured Mexico in 1956; during both trips, she documented her experiences and captured local culture in her paintings and sketches.

She later found work as a cartoonist, department store shoe illustrator and textile designer. She became known for her work as an illustrator for many publications including the Saturday Evening Post, Redbook and The New York Times Magazine. She also earned commissions from companies such as Exxon, IBM, Smith Kline, Beckman and from individuals for whom she painted portraits of people and pets (which I’m sure many of you reading this are in possession of). She was associated with the Frank J. Miele and Jay Johnson Folk Art galleries, both in New York. In 1988, she was commissioned by the US Postal Service to design a stamp commemorating composer Irving Berlin's 100th birthday. 


Joan and Darwin grew up in Cleveland, OH and moved to New York City around the same time, living only a block away from each other in the Village, but didn’t meet until 1958. They were introduced at a dinner party by Merle, a friend of Joan's from art school and had their first date at Chumley’s, now The Eighty Six. After getting married in 1960, they lived at various addresses around Greenwich Village until 1968 when they bought their beloved brownstone on Jane Street. Joan and Darwin moved to Santa Barbara, CA in 1996, to Burbank, CA in 2006, and then made their final move to Albuquerque, NM in 2021.

Although Joan was primarily known for her painting, she also sculpted, quilted, made jewelry, hooked rugs and assembled visual puns – all of which brought her so much joy. Perhaps the only creative endeavor in which she didn’t excel at was cooking. She couldn’t understand why someone would spend so much time on something that wouldn’t last. Despite this, she still made an oft-requested carrot cake and pumpkin pie.

Besides her art, Joan had a great love for genealogy and traced her Mennonite family back to Switzerland where her 11x great-uncle Hans Landis (c. 1550) was a leader of the Anabaptists and was executed for religious obstinacy on September 30, 1614. The first Landis family members arrived in the British colony of Pennsylvania in 1717. Joan documented her family history in a series of story paintings and even won a top honor at a national quilting contest for her depiction of her family’s journey from Switzerland called “Coming to America”.

Joan didn’t paint in the last year and a half of her life because she felt too shaky and always the perfectionist, didn’t think she could paint the way she had. But she never stopped being creative. After Darwin died, she made two quilts from some of his shirts – turning a lifetime of memories into something beautiful to wrap herself in.

In her last years, she enjoyed keeping up with the news, reading the New Yorker, doing puzzles and sharing stories about her past.