Valenti Angelo (1897-1982)

Born in Italy in 1897, Valenti Angelo moved to the United States when he was a teenager. Following a brief period of schooling, he worked at several factories in and around the San Francisco Bay area. When he took a job as a janitor at an art school, one of the instructors became aware of his keen interest in art. Before long Angelo attended classes, assisted with printing, and eventually obtained apprentice work through an affiliation of the school with a commercial art and engraving company. His success there led to various opportunities to work with printers as an illustrator of various publications. His first illustrations for Letter of Amerigo Vespucci were published in 1926. This book won the country's highest award for book design from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Between 1926 and 1933, his designs and illustrations appeared in more than forty books. He also wrote and illustrated a number of children's books. His work as an illustrator continued into the 1970s.

It was during the mid 1930's that Angelo started painting. His work was exhibited widely in local galleries. In 1934, he moved to New York City where he showed at Ferrigal Galleries. His career as a printer and illustrator flourished on the East Coast as well. Of the many books he worked on, published by several publishing houses in the New York area, thirty made it to the American Institute of Graphic Arts yearly lists of the Fifty Books of the Year.

The prints on exhibit here are representative of what Angelo was best known for--stylized form, economic use of color and line, as well as spare and effective design. Author, illustrator, printmaker, and painter, Valenti Angelo was a very prolific artist.


Letterio Calapai (1902 -1993)

Letterio Calapai was born in Boston as the son of immigrant Sicilian parents. While his parents were not well off financially, they gave their children much exposure to culture. Young Letterio was encouraged to pursue the arts from an early age. Upon his graduation from high school, he received a painting set from one of his teachers, who recognized his artistic talent. This inspired him to enroll at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (known today as the Massachusetts College of Art). He later received a two-year scholarship at the School of Fine Arts and Crafts in Boston.

In 1928, Calapai moved to New York and worked in a lithography shop while taking drawing classes at the Art Students League and sculpture classes at the Beaux Art Institute of Design. Some time in the mid 1930s, Charles Hopkinson, an old professor, proposed that Calapai work only part-time and focus on his art work. Hopkinson offered to compensate him for the money he did not earn as a result. Calapai henceforth directed his attention entirely to printmaking. Experimenting with wood and metal engraving techniques, he made prints of rural and urban landscapes.

Additionally, Calapai was dedicated to art education. He founded and chaired the Graphic Arts Department of the Albright Art School in Buffalo, NY (1949 - 1955), taught at the New School for Social Research (1955 - 1962), established the Intaglio Workshop for Advanced Printmaking in New York, and taught at various other universities and colleges. The inspiration he received from his professors was a great force in his career as he, in turn, enjoyed supporting and encouraging the endeavors of his many students. During the later part of his life, Calapai settled and worked in a studio in Glencoe, Illinois.


John S. De Martelly (1903 - 1980)

John De Martelly was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, in Florence, Italy, as well as the Royal College of Art in London. De Martelly was active throughout his life as a lithographer, etcher, painter, illustrator, teacher and writer. He was an artist-in-residence at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He then went on to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he became a friend of Thomas Hart Benton. De Martelly's lithographs capture the essence of the rural American landscape.

Michael Di Cerbo (b. 1955)

A native of Paterson, New Jersey, Michael Di Cerbo received his BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He has taught at Brooklyn College (1974-75), Seton Hall University (1992-99), Nassau Community College (1995-96), and the Arts Center of Northern New Jersey (1997-99). He currently resides and works in Manhattan.

As president of the Society of American Graphic Artists, from 1989 to 1994, Di Cerbo was involved in the organization and curatorial aspects of thirty-two exhibitions throughout the United States, Spain, and Taiwan. For several of these, he designed catalogues. Di Cerbo's own work has been widely exhibited and the artist is the recipient of numerous rewards. Among the most recent are the Beveled Edge Award, the Silver Medal Award of the Audubon Artists 52nd National Exhibition, and the NYC Purchase Award.

The concrete, steel, and glass of the American city are important sources of inspiration for Di Cerbo. He turns urban grandeur into geometric forms and patterns of light and dark that allude to the soaring architecture of skyscrapers. In his prints, one sees the city from the perspective of both ant and eagle as buildings reach endlessly upwards or fall away to infinite chasms below. The images, though devoid of people and any overt signs of life, create a sense of mystery. We find ourselves alone in Di Cerbo's compositions as observers of a cityscape that reflects a sense of timelessness.


Luigi Lucioni (1900-1988)

Luigi Lucioni was born in 1900 in the village of Malnate near Lake Como, in Northern Italy. He began taking drawing lessons at age six. When he was ten, his family moved to America and settled in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was trained as an artist at the National Academy, Cooper Union, and the Art Students League, all in New York City. Early in his career, he was represented by several New York City galleries. But it was in the state of Vermont that he made his reputation. After visiting that state briefly in the early 1930s and having acquired an important painting commission there from a wealthy patron, he decided to make his summer home in Manchester, Vermont.

Lucioni is best known for his depictions of the landscapes of Vermont in both paintings and etchings. Life magazine even gave him the title of "painter-laureate" of Vermont. He received Popular Prize awards from the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Carnegie International Exhibition. Many of Lucioni's etchings and paintings are in the permanent collections of the country's leading museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Lucioni claimed that his printmaking was most influenced by Piranesi, Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Whistler and John Taylor Arms. Of his own work he stated, "My idea of realism is not what you see…it's to create what there is in reality-the thing that makes it real without copying all the little trivial things…Once I have set them down {I want to} make them as absolutely alive as possible."

Alessandro Mastro-Valerio (1887-1953)

Alessandro Mastro-Valerio was born in the Puglia region of Italy. Between 1906 and 1913, he attended the Salvatore Rosa Art Institute in Naples, which awarded him a traveling scholarship to study art in schools around Italy. In 1913, he moved to Chicago, to join his brother and uncle. He established himself as a commercial artist and painted portraits of Chicago's elite.

In 1919, he moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he made a name for himself painting a mural in the Ypsilanti National Bank. A highly regarded painter and watercolorist, Mastro-Valerio procured a teaching position at Michigan State Normal College, now Eastern Michigan University. He later became a part-time instructor and, in 1952, a professor in the Art Department of the University of Michigan. He was granted American citizenship in April 1926.

Encouraged by his friend, Dr. Warren P. Lombard, Mastro-Valerio began to make prints in 1930. As a graphic artist he was largely self-taught. His printmaking career spanned twenty-two years, during which time he became best known for his mezzotints. He also worked in drypoint, etching, wood engraving, and aquatint, producing several experimental continuous bite and sugar-lift aquatints. While his primary source of inspiration was the female nude, Mastro-Valerio moved beyond its classical parameters and experimented with abstract forms. He also produced landscape engravings. In 1949, he won the Cannon prize from the National Academy of Design for the abstract aquatint, Motif in a Seascape. Two years later he was appointed an Associate Member of the Academy.


Michael Pellettieri (b. 1943)

Michael Pellettieri was born in New York. During the 1960s, he earned a BA in Fine Arts from the College of the City of New York and an MA from Hunter College. He concurrently studied at the Art Students League. As a student, Pellettieri was the winner of three scholarships: a Merit Scholarship at the Art Students League and a Pratt Graphics Art Center summer grant in 1964; and a U.S. State Department Grant to study in India in 1969. He has been the Master Printer at the League since 1970 and has also worked there as an instructor of graphic art. Pellettieri taught etching, relief printing, collagraphy and monotype during his six-year tenure at the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts in Summit, NJ. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's Teachers College.

Pellettieri's printing accomplishments are vast, as he makes use of various print techniques and demonstrates versatility with regard to his subject matter as well. Among his awards are the Silver Medallion from the Audubon Artists (1982); a Mac Dowell Colony Fellowship (1988); the Purchase Prize, National Works on Paper, from the University of Mississippi (1991) and the Ben and Beatrice Goldstein Foundation Award (1991).

According to Pellettieri, "The search for a visual idea begins with a visual experience. The idea ruminates and eventually evolves with a life of its own. A rich assortment of print mediums can transform the idea and impart qualities of its own. As an instructor, I am interested in exploring this route together in an atmosphere of structure and discovery."


Luigi Rist (1888-1959)

Luigi Rist was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1888. While attending the Newark Technical School, he taught himself painting and woodblock printing. To improve these skills, Rist, in 1928, went to Europe. There he met with Morris Blackburn, who was affiliated with the Philadelphia Academy of Art. Blackburn spurred him on to perfect the age-old tradition of woodblock printing.

Rist's first print was executed in 1928 at the Grand Central School of Art but it has not survived. In fact, the prints made between 1931 and 1935 are the earliest prints by the artist that are known. By the 1940's, his style matured and the strong print Sunflowers won first prize at the American Color Print Society's maiden exhibition. He received immediate recognition and from this point on devoted all his time to the tedious process of woodblock printing.

Rist's body of work is small and consists of just forty completed prints. His production amounted to, at best, two prints annually, but most years he made only one. Rist's prints can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, The Newark Museum, and the Library of Congress.

In a 1946 interview with the Newark Sunday Call, Rist commented on the process he employed: "This method of printing is rather a way of painting. Each print has its own individual quality obtainable by no other means of graphic art method. In a sense, then, each print is an original."

                                 
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