A printmaker, painter and sculptor Edmond Casarella was born in Newark, New Jersey on September 3, 1920. Upon his graduation from Cooper Union in 1942, he was hired by Anthony Velonis to print serigraphs at Creative Printmakers under the National Youth Administration which was part of the New Deal. The following year he created the poster for the 1943 exhibition, Artists for Victory. Casarella joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and fought in Europe during World War II. After his discharge he studied at the Brooklyn Museum School from 1949 to 1951, studying printmaking with Gabor Peterdi.
Casarella made his first paper relief print about 1948 and continued to experiment with the medium throughout his career. His work was shown in 1949 at the Laurel Gallery in New York and in 1952 he was being represented by Margaret Lowengrund’s Contemporaries Gallery. In 1953, his and Vincent Longo’s work was mounted in an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. That same year Casarella’s work was included in the Young American Printmakers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1962, he was included in the widely traveled exhibition, American Prints Today. He received a Fullbright Fellowship in 1951, a Tiffany Award in 1955 and a Guggenheim Grant in 1960. These allowed him to travel throughout Italy and Greece.
Casarella taught courses at the Brooklyn Museum from 1955 to 1960 and at Cooper Union and Finch College from 1969 to 1975. During the 1960s he also taught courses at the Arts Students’ League and Hunter College in Manhattan and had temporary teaching positions at the Pratt Institute, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Columbia University.
Casarella was an Academician of the National Academy of Design and his prints, paintings and sculpture have been included in a score of exhibitions in the United States and Eastern Europe. His work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, the Speed Art Museum, the Chazen Museum of Art, the Green National Museum in Athens and the Australian National Museum in Canberra.
Ed Casarella died on February 13, 1996 in Englewood, New Jersey.
