Victor Caglioti of Greenport Remembered as Celebrated Artist

Victor Caglioti, painter, professor, and proudly self-proclaimed peasant, died on Aug. 26 in Greenport. He was 90.

He has been described by many as larger-than-life and a teacher-for-life. Before all else, he was a painter — an identity which flowed into all aspects of his life. Painting, for him, encompassed the human experience. He did not paint for himself. He did not paint for the image. He painted for the mind, and for the “curiosity of painting.”

It was this curiosity that led him to Albright Art School in the 1950s, where he arrived to find his portfolio abandoned in the hall and the school closed. Left scrambling in an unfamiliar city, he found himself enrolled in Buffalo State and living in a boarding house. It was there he met the love of his life, Roberta Bieber, and some key artists for his future career including the painter Howard Conant.

Conant was instrumental in furthering his art education at New York University and Columbia.

His wife, Roberta, was key in guiding him from being a fulltime gardener (and former gravedigger) to a tenured faculty member in the Studio Art department at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. A member of the Hamptons’ artist community since the late 1950s, Caglioti was a long-time player in what became the annual Artists and Writers Softball Game. First as a player (3rd and 1st base), and later as a coach, he was a fixture at the game — from its casual beginnings to today’s star-studded lineups.

His presence in the Hamptons led him to spend summers teaching at Southampton College of Long Island University as a visiting artist. He also had visiting appointments at Sacred Heart University, Manhattanville College, and Rutgers University. He received recognition from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (Invitational) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Artist Revolving Funds); Commissions from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (mural awarded, project discontinued) and Colwell Press (Mechanical Original), numerous grants, requests for consultations and invitations including an exhibition and catalog statement for the National Conference of Scientists, the theme being “Vision and Three Dimensional Representation.”

He has had solo shows at Avanti Galleries (NY), Krasner Gallery (NY), Benson Gallery (NY), Benton Gallery (NY), Martin Gallery (MN), Gallery 118 (MN), Guild Hall (NY), among many other solo and group shows. His work is represented in numerous public, corporate, and private collections, including New York University, Guild Hall, St. Lawrence University, the Banco de Roma, 3M Corporation, Target Center, Dayton Hudson Corporation, among many others. Students and faculty kept in contact with him over the years.

Caglioti was widely known for his warmth as a teacher and mentor, and many of his students came to refer to him with affection and admiration as “Pop.” His presence was so revered that one student “rescued” a Styrofoam coffee cup that his professor had slyly shaped during the course of a meeting, then discarded. That student retrieved, framed and displayed that cup for over fifty years — transformed by the artist’s hands into an object of art. That was Caglioti’s surpassing talent and lifelong aspiration — to transform objects and to transform lives.

Recently, Caglioti had been focusing on a written project, an “opera,” under the pen name Frank Farniolas. In it he wrote, “I do not paint for an audience or for myself. I paint for the chance to experience myself. I paint for the curiosity of painting.”

In this vein, Caglioti does not have a collection of paintings.

He has one painting. Each canvas, simultaneously convex and concave, is a segment of the endless painting — an extension of a boundless creative vision aimed at making visible what one can’t see.

As he once said in an interview with the Minnesota Daily (Jan. 24, 1994), his work is “like the whole flow of humanity.” His personal segment of humanity will be missed but will live on in his work, his students, and his family.

He is predeceased by his wife (Roberta) parents (Giuseppe and Angela Rosa), siblings (Dominic, Thomas, Anthony, Rugierre), son (Antonio) and son-in-law (Fredric Lawson). He is survived by his daughters (Angelarosa Caglioti-Lawson and Carla Caglioti), son-in-law (John Hall), daughter-in-law (Daphne Trakis), grandchildren (Gemma Caglioti, Paolo Caglioti, Loomis Hall) and many nieces and nephews. All were very much loved.