Salvatore Grippi, painter, printmaker and sculptor, was born in Buffalo, New York on September 30, 1921. He studied at the Albright Art School, the Museum of Modern Art School, the Art Students’ League under the G.I.Bill, Atelier 17 in New York, and Istituto Statale d’Arte in Florence as a Fullbright Scholar.

Grippi has been an influential teacher with positions at Cooper Union Art School, Fieldston School Arts Center, School of Visual Arts, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate School, and Ithaca College.

Grippi's paintings and prints have been included in a host of exhibitions throughout the United States. Grippi was a contributor to "Twenty-one Etchings and Poems," which was started at Atelier 17 in New York and published by the Morris Gallery in 1960. It was a collaboration between twenty-one Atelier 17 printmakers and twenty-one poets.

His work is included in the collections of the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the British Museum, London; the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the Library of Congress and the Hirshhorn Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College, Massachusetts.

Salvatore Grippi died in Brewster, Massachusetts on 30 November 2017 at age 96.