Tony Deblasi

My family and I immigrated to the United States from Sicily when I was five years old. We lived in New Jersey, and in my teens, Narragansett, Rhode Island, where I completed high school.

After graduating from Indiana University, I became a one-person art department at Washington and Jefferson College, expanding the art program and faculty in my three years there. In 1966, I joined the Michigan State University faculty and taught graduate and undergraduate painting as a full time professor. Twenty years later, in 1986, I left MSU for New York City where I now live and work. to concentrate on a career in New York, where I now live and work. During my first years there, I supplemented my income from art sales teaching classes at the School of Visual Arts.


My early three dimensional work consists of gestural shapes, each cut from wood, and attached directly to the wall, similar to low relief. The work now extends further from the wall, is more linear, resembling line drawing if made 3D. What I am presenting here in addition to the larger paintings are the sketches and studies that I create in the process of developing a 3D work.

After four years in the U.S. Navy and two years of art courses at the University of Rhode Island, at the age of 24, I moved to New York to attend the Art Students League. I returned to Rhode Island two years later and obtained a BA in Art and History at the University of Rhode Island and went on to receive my MFA from Indiana University.

At the Art Students League, I studied with Sidney Dickenson among others. Artists and art historians whom I studied with at Indiana University, included William Bailey, James McGarrell, Rudy Pozzotti, Albert Elsen and Henry Hope. Despite having studied entirely with figurative artists, within five years of finishing my graduate work, I gravitated to abstraction. This change was dictated by my interest in giving form to color rather color to form. Inspirations for the work have been Matisse’s colorful and ambiguous “Cutouts,” Kandinsky’s “Improvisations,” Kline’s gestural structuring, Ellsworth Kelly’s perfect balance of color to form, and Twombly’s animated “scribbles.”

One-person shows that have played an important role in my career have been those at The Detroit Institute of Art; Louis K. Meisel Gallery, NY; The Dorothy Blau Gallery, Bay Harbor Island, FL; Wake Forest University Art Gallery, Winston-Salem; Grace Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach; Razor Gallery, NY; Hokin Kaufman Gallery, Chicago; and The Thirty-third Corcoran Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C. (not a one-person show, but was represented by eight paintings; each artist (12) in separate rooms)

Museum shows that I have participated in include the Detroit Institute of Art; the Riverside Museum, NY; the John Herron Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; Indiana University Museum, Bloomington, IN; the Butler Institute of Arts, Youngstown, OH; and the Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, MI.