Narcissus Robert Quagliata

"Are You Sleepy Tonight?" Interior with Nude

c. 1969

An Italian and US citizen, Narcissus Quagliata (Italian-American, b. 1942) was born in Rome, Italy, in 1942, where he studied painting with the metaphysical painter Georgio De Chirico. At the age of 19, Narcissus moved to the United States and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute (under two founding members of the Bay Area figurative school of painting, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn) receiving both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in painting and graphics. After graduating with a BFA and MFA in painting, he spent four years in a studio he built himself in what is now a National Wilderness Area on the coastal mountain range of Northern California. In that studio he made the unique artistic decision to use glass rather than canvas to capture the reality of light itself. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC.; Yokohama City Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Oakland Museum, California; Corning Museum of Glass, New York; and Glasmalerei-Museum Izu Kogen, Shizuoka-Ken, Japan. Building commissions include the Public Library of Gainesville, Florida; Synagogue Acapulco Seventy, Mexico City; and in California, Oakland’s Alice Art Center, the Charles Schwab Building in San Francisco, City of San Leandro Civic Center, and Oakland’s Pacific Bell Building. He resides and has studios in Mexico and Taiwan.