(1898-1931)
Calogero Salvatore Scibetta was an Italian-American painter, commercial artist, and teacher. He was a promising impressionist painter in the 1920s whose work primarily consisted of oil paintings of landscapes, cityscapes, Western New York scenic views, Italian and Spanish scenes, portraits and florals. He was born in 1898 in Montedoro, Sicily and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1903, settling in Buffalo. Scibetta, along with his younger brothers Angelo Charles Scibetta and Pascal Scibetta, went on to become successful painters and muralists in the Buffalo area.
Scibetta won a scholarship to attend the Buffalo School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Florence Julia Bach and Urquhart Wilcox. He also studied landscape painting under the guidance of Otto Henry Schneider, working as Schneider’s assistant landscape instructor at the Art Students League of Buffalo from 1921-1923. He also served on the Students Council at the Buffalo School of Fine Arts in 1922, and taught composition classes at the school. In 1923, he received a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with notable artists including Frank Vincent DuMond, George Brandt Bridgeman, and Edward Penfield.
Scibetta was a member of several professional organizations including the Guild of Allied Artists, the Art Students League, The Arts Club of Buffalo, the Tiffany Foundation, and the Buffalo Society of Artists, exhibiting regularly with each organization. He participated in the Buffalo Society of Artists annual and Thumb-Box exhibitions and had solo shows at the Buffalo School of Fine Arts and The Arts Club of Buffalo. He also won the Tiffany Foundation Fellowship Prize in 1924, received an honorable mention at the Buffalo Society of Artists in 1926, second prize with the Arts Club of Buffalo in 1926, and an honorable mention in a number of exhibitions with the Buffalo School of Fine Arts.
On October 1, 1928, Scibetta married his wife Patricia and shortly after, the couple set sail on the S.S. Roma to spend the next two years painting and traveling throughout Europe. The following year, Scibetta died suddenly on October 16, 1929, following an operation to treat a critical infection in Valencia, Spain.He was one of Buffalo’s few promising impressionist painters, but because of his early death at age 33, his work is very difficult to locate.