Vincent Richard Campanella

Vincent Campanella is known both as an artist and for his work teaching art. He was classically trained, and his artistic practice shifted from social realism to abstraction. Campanella often painted landscapes, and over his long career he also depicted scenes of workers and industrial spaces.

Campanella was a child prodigy, winning the Wanamaker Prize for young artists in New York City at the age of seven in 1922. That same year he began his studies in art at the Leonardo Da Vinci Art School in New York City. Campanella studied at the National Academy of Design in New York from 1931 to 1933 with Leon Kroll, but cut his studies short to work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as an easel artist.

In 1938, while working for the WPA, Campanella was sent to the mining town of Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he worked for nine months as an art director and artist-in-residence. There he also taught evening classes on art appreciation and studio classes in painting. In 1939, Campanella organized a permanent fine arts center in Rock Springs. Campanella later moved to Laramie, where he worked as an instructor and artist-in-residence at the University of Wyoming. Inspired by the vast open space and dramatic geography of Wyoming, Campanella’s artistic style began to transition from social realism to abstraction during this time.

In 1941, Campanella moved back to New York City, where he worked at a munitions factory throughout World War II. After the war, he taught at Columbia University from 1946 to 1949, and was represented by the Frank Rehn Gallery, which also showed the artists Charles Burchfield, Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh. Campanella was represented by Frank Rehn until Rehn’s death in 1957 and during this time he had solo artist exhibitions that were both critical and commercial successes.

In 1949, Campanella accepted a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, where he taught until 1952. At the art institute, he taught both Robert Morris and Wilbur Niewald. In 1952, Campanella began teaching in the art department at Park College in Parkville, Missouri. While working at Park, Campanella also earned a bachelor of arts in 1954, and a master's of art in philosophy in 1956 from the University of Kansas City (now known as the University of Missouri-Kansas City).

Campanella was one of the founders of the Mid-America Art Association in Kansas City, where he served as the presentation committee chairman in 1952 and then president in 1953. In 1967, Campanella received a prestigious artist fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, now known as MacDowell. Campanella was a professor at Park University for thirty years, retiring in 1980; he continued as a professor emeritus until 2001.

Campanella was friends with fellow Kansas City artist Thomas Hart Benton. After Benton’s death in 1975, Campanella became curator of the art left in Benton’s studio at the request of Benton’s wife, Rita.