Gregorio Prestopino, painter, printmaker, and teacher, was born in New York’s Little Italy on 21 June 1907 to Antonino Prestopino and Letteria Rando, both immigrants from Messina, Italy. At the age of fourteen-years-old, Prestopino was awarded a scholarship to the National Academy of Design, where he was a student of Charles Hawthorne. While at the Academy, he came under the influence of the Ashcan School painters.

After completing his schooling, Prestopino set up his studio in New York’s Harlem and for thirty years he was a social realist, painting the pulse of the city: dock workers, laborers, vendors, Lower East Side streets, and life in Harlem.

Prestopino received MacDowell Fellowships in 1934 and 1954 through 1960. In 1954 he became director of the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He taught painting at the Brooklyn Museum School between 1941 and 1949, the New School of Social Research between 1949 and 1965, he was artist-in-residence at Michigan State University in 1960, and artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome during the 1968-69 session.

Prestopino’s resumé lists twenty-eight solo exhibitions in New York and seven retrospective exhibitions. His work was included in numerous group exhibitions including American Art Today, New York World’s Fair 1939; the Golden Gate International Exposition, San Francisco, 1939; and the Museum of Modern Art’s Recent Acquisitions: The Work of Young Americans in 1943.

In 1961, Prestopino was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and, in 1976, he was elected a member of the institute. During the 1960s and 1970s, he supported civil rights causes and antiwar movements by donating funds raised from the sales of his art and designs.

The works of Gregorio Prestopino are represented in the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Hirshhorn Museum, the Phillips Collection, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

For his retrospective exhibition at the State Museum at Trenton, New Jersey, Prestopino wrote this statement, “At a very early age I knew that I wanted to be a painter; no other way of life held any attraction for me. This burning youthful ambition led me to the art school of the National Academy of Design, and since then I have never worked seriously at anything but painting, or to be exact, the visual arts. In the past I have had minimal success in trying to explain my work to others, so I must leave it to speak for itself.”

Gregorio Prestopino died in Princeton, New Jersey on 19 December 1984.