*Tracing Threads Through Time: The Artwork of William C. Maggio*, 2024-2025, installation view, Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Photo: Tullis Johnson.

William C. Maggio, artist, has lived through eight and a half decades of the world at this point.

I first heard of Bill Maggio when a friend let out a soft gasp of surprise while reading the news on her phone that his wife Carol had died. I first saw his work in this light and thought I knew so easily that his was art about grief, made of grief. I saw what I thought was a man looking at death, seeing its total ruin. I soon learned that the work that I so easily identified as about mourning had existed long before this death, so I was wrong.

Perhaps I can be forgiven, because to look at Bill’s work is to be put in a situation, faced with something totalizing: frightful and comforting both, wound and salve.

Maggio entered this world in 1939 into a kind of Italian American commune in the Fruit Belt of Buffalo. Eight families were jumbled into an apartment complex, a tangle of uncles, aunts, and cousins indistinguishable from brothers and sisters. “I thought I had a lot of mothers,” Bill says. His grandmother and grandfather had a delicatessen on the corner. No one locked their doors.

In the early half of the twentieth century, the Fruit Belt was predominantly a German neighborhood, inhabited by immigrants and their descendants who had, in the United States’s waterwheel of status, already ascended a few rungs by the time the first mass of Italians came to Buffalo just before the turn of the century. These Italian immigrants packed into old homes, warehouses, and other buildings not designed for human habitation. Genteel society regarded the new arrivals less-than-favorably, as in a lot of immigrant stories. One historian catches the mood: “Not only were they mostly Catholic and non-English-speaking, but they were poor, illiterate, frequently unemployed, and, most native Buffalonians agreed, sadly unprepared for self-government.” 1

One hears in Maggio’s story the leitmotifs of second and third generation immigrants rising within their new country’s class drama: a couple of uncles who were doctors, another a construction foreman. At midcentury, the Fruit Belt was changing, too. The German enclaves dispersed to the suburbs as the Black population of Buffalo swelled, and eventually city planning cut a swath of destruction through the Fruit Belt to make way for the Kensington Expressway. One can imagine Maggio coming of age in this flux of the city’s fortunes.

Civic Stadium was just around the corner: three swimming pools, handball and tennis courts, a baseball diamond. Kids would ride sleds down the hill by the Connecticut Street Armory. The family didn’t have a lot of money, so they would make their own toys: a derby car from a broken skate, an orange crate, and a two-by-four.

*Tracing Threads Through Time: The Artwork of William C. Maggio*, 2024-2025, installation view, Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Photo: Hope Grunert.

There was music everywhere. Maggio’s father was a bassist who played what Maggio calls “society music.” He has a lot of memories of watching his father practice. An uncle upstairs owned a piano, another played the sax, his grandmother the guitar. Bill himself was schooled in classical piano.

That piano got him his first job at 14: an Irish wedding at a bar in South Buffalo. His parents told him he could take the gig if he went with his cousin Charlie (later a neurosurgeon). They played Irish music all day for $10. Cab fare was $8. Charlie and Bill split the profit.

Later, his foreman uncle got him a job in construction for a few summers, and Maggio worked with the crew building the Skyway. He used to run down the steel structure for lunch breaks and run back up. Teams of men worked in relay, building out the bridge bay by bay. Carpenters would lay out plywood bracing between the I beams, then steelworkers came to cut and bend rebar into place, and finally the concrete pourers arrived. Maggio was one of these, and it was as a concrete pourer that he saw two men plunge to their deaths. He remembers the sight of one bouncing off the roof of a car one hundred feet below. Only luck or God saved Maggio from being one of them.

After dinner as a kid, Maggio would draw on any kind of paper available. He’d get a comic book and try to draw the characters. On Saturdays, he and a gang of kids would walk to the Buffalo Museum of Science, where after a film they would all be given paper and crayons and draw the displays.

In school, Maggio was always doodling. “My mom got called to school a couple of times because I wasn’t paying attention. ‘All he does is draw!’” Maggio mimics the teacher.

For two years, he attended Canisius High School, a Catholic school with no art program, before transferring to Grover Cleveland. The public high school’s promised art program left something to be desired, but it was here that Maggio met the woman who would become his wife.

A friend on the football team introduced them. “’Oh, you’ve got to meet Carol,’” Maggio recalls the friend saying. “And I met Carol, and that was it.” A big, handsome lineman also liked her. Stiff competition, but Maggio could play piano like Erroll Garner. “Sometimes it just works out,” he says.

Carol Sole was a straight-A honors student all set to go to college with Maggio when her father had a heart attack. “She would have made a wonderful teacher,” Maggio says, but instead she took a job at the Home Insurance Co. and cared for her family. Still, she encouraged Maggio to continue pursuing art and even bought him his first camera.

While she worked, he attended what’s now Buffalo State University for art education, working with a phenomenal faculty including the painter Roland Wise and the sculptor Joseph Bolinsky. “Just one after another,” Maggio says. Wise taught him that drawing was the basis of all art: a lesson Maggio would pass on to his own students one day.

The Buffalo native was thrown in with classmates from New York City and Long Island, the kind of sophisticates who came armed with knowledge of current art movements and art history and exposure to the masterworks. But one professor in particular, Robert Squeri, took Maggio under his wing. “He referred to me as a diamond in the rough,” says Maggio, sort of a compliment, sort of an insult. “He said, ‘I'm going to mentor you.’”

Squeri was strict. With his guidance, Maggio delved into the graphic arts, learning lithography, etching, drypoint, silk screen, woodcut, and engraving. He also frequently experimented with multimedia mixtures of paint and drawing materials. Squeri even pressured Maggio to travel after college and put off marriage, a delay Maggio was not interested in.

Carol and Bill married on July 9, 1960, and moved into an apartment on Porter Avenue owned by one of Maggio’s uncles, a doctor whose office was on the first floor. Maggio began working as an art teacher at the public school he had attended as a kid. He would teach for over thirty years, first in Buffalo and then in Grand Island.

Maggio’s classroom was known as a kind of haven. It had a couch, and he’d play jazz records. When another teacher couldn’t locate one of their students, they would wander down to Bill’s class and usually find the errant student there. Maggio never yelled, never raised his voice. If the class got too rowdy, he would just gently pat the air with both hands. Hush.

In his first year, he brought home $4,500, which he supplemented with steady work teaching private piano lessons. “At one time, I had 25 piano students,” Maggio says.

By that point, Bill Evans had long beaten out Johann Sebastian Bach in Maggio’s training. He gigged in jazz combos regularly, sometimes playing six nights a week, ten o’clock until two in the morning.

“I played in just about every venue in the city and Niagara Falls: The Cloister, Gabriel’s Gate, the Statler, the Westbrook Hotel, the Colonie Lounge, a lot of little bars, John’s Flaming Hearth in Niagara Falls. There was a hotel with a waterfall on one wall on Main Street. I played all the different country clubs, society parties, weddings. The Country Club of Buffalo, the Brookfield, Transit Valley.” Sometimes in a tuxedo, sometimes in shirtsleeves.

And while Bill worked, Carol raised the kids.

“We had four boys, my wife and I, and she was . . . she was magnificent,” Maggio says. He is proud of her, honored by her, humbled. “She virtually raised the boys. They all went to private high schools. Bill and Burt went to Canisius College, Joe and John went to Rutgers University.” The list of their accomplishments tumbles out of him: rowing and baseball and filmmaking and running a construction business and owning their own businesses and getting married and having their own kids.

“I guess my wife and I were a good team, but she did the bulk of raising the boys, and they were good boys.” He grew garlic and tomatoes in the backyard. She played golf and learned the violin. So that was how Bill and Carol made a life together.

Throughout this time, he kept up his art practice. Works like the Sextions series from the early 1980s—currently on view in Tracing Threads Through Time: The Artwork of William C. Maggio—are soft shades of washed out yellow and brown. Faces and figures preoccupy the drawings. His faces are acute: the drawn eyes, pursed lips, and intentness of his Fragments series (1995–97), cut together so as to disorder and reorder, show attention to expression and emotion.

As his work plays more and less with human forms, surfaces predominate, even in the titles: Slate drawings (2003–04) have their stencil letterings, almost the look of a rubbing, and mark-making-like script, inscriptions of a surface on a skin, blurring both. In Wallscapes (1999–2005), the figure disappears entirely, and Maggio seems to press his vision right up against something flat and unyielding, pitching and scratching at it like a challenge to entry.

It was in this series that Maggio moved from paper to canvas, and the works bear the scars of his process: revelation by way of mutilation. As he layered paint and scraped it away, he broke through the substrate itself, until only a sort of tattered sparring partner remained. It took as much as it could take, and Maggio needed a surface that could endure him.

Sometime in the early 2000s, that hard surface opened into an almost unlimited expanse, the cosmic or the quantum realm.

His studio today gives some impression of this work. He staples his canvas directly to the wall, which provides a stiffer backing for his efforts to gouge and scrape and cut away the paint. A pile of discarded razor blades sits near to hand, and that wall—white but pitted with thousands of punctures, like a vast, inverted starry constellation—is its own kind of Bill Maggio canvas. He uses house paint, which dries quickly and requires hard work to create nests of marks. His hands are tough. “My poor wife!” he jokes to a crowd in an artist talk in 2018.

And that process says something too: Maggio’s painting is labored.

“He has to go in probably with the end of his brush or something else to dig into it to make all those marks,” says Rachel Shelton, who helped organize a show of Maggio’s work at Eleven Twenty Projects in 2018. “He goes in, and he does all this additive and subtractive work, and then more additive and then more subtractive, like he's building something up so that he can reveal the painting in it. But he's also never done. A painting will be in his studio, and he’ll walk by and he’ll work on it, because he's still trying to pull something out of it.”

Bob Scalise, UB Art Galleries Director and Maggio’s neighbor and friend, recalls seeing the artist at a late 1990s Antoni Tàpies show at the Anderson Gallery. The Spanish artist paints like a sculptor: dense work, caked in brutal layers. Scalise remembers in-depth conversations with Maggio about Tàpies. He reflects: “Tàpies’s work is such a profound exploration of texture, material, and the physicality of painting. He builds up the surface until it’s a tactile sensory object in its own right. He’ll use materials like sand, concrete, doors, shirts, and even imprints like hand and footprints—it’s constructive and it’s destructive. He'll scrape down the canvas to reveal the underpainting.”

Consider, too, that at around the same time Maggio and his wife were preparing to travel to North Carolina, where his son Bert was getting married. Maggio felt unwell. His doctor put him through a stress test, and Maggio ended up going into the hospital to have stents put in. The night before the procedure, his heart stopped entirely.

“I had an out-of-life experience,” says Maggio. “They talk about bright light, that's nothing compared to what I saw. And it felt so great, so light. When I first started to work again, when I got cleared, I wanted to try and capture that feeling of dying. People say, ‘What's it like to die?’ It's beautiful.”

“You can only control so much in your life,” Scalise says, and this includes the artistic process. “So then you leave some part of it to chance. You build up layers and then you peel it away. Sometimes the properties of the paint and materials reveal themselves to you. And sometimes it's just terrible."

Maggio tells me that his wife wanted to understand his work so badly that she learned to draw. “So I got her sketchbooks.” She was a voracious reader. “If I mentioned an artist’s name, she’d look it up.”

“She was such a giving person,” Maggio says, “and she helped, and worked so hard, and I never thought—” he pauses. “But we had no say in that.”

On the first day of 2021, Carol Maggio passed away of pancreatic cancer. It came on so quickly. I tell Shelton about my mistake, about how I thought his work was about grief but that I didn’t know the timeline, how I was wrong, that it had to be something else.

“I mean, when you get to his point in life,” she says, “whether it’s before the death of his partner, whether it’s harder times as a couple, or tough decision-making, or watching the world go through decades of iteration socially, then you’ve been through plenty of grief.”

Looking at Maggio’s work, I think the truth is that all of it is in there. Grief, yes. Death, yes, but life as well, celebrated, senses struck dumb with the awe of it, and probably the sadness of joy that didn’t know its time was limited.

“I've been so blessed,” says Maggio. “I have been blessed. I don’t know how else to put it. I have been blessed,” and he’s smiling while he says all this. “I just wish my wife were here.”

Brenda K. Shelton, Reformers in Search of Yesterday: Buffalo in the 1890s (State University of New York Press, 1976), 7.

After This, Nothing Happened

“Sometime in the early 2000s, that hard surface opened into an almost unlimited expanse, the cosmic or the quantum realm.”

After This, Nothing Happened

“Sometime in the early 2000s, that hard surface opened into an almost unlimited expanse, the cosmic or the quantum realm.”

In Studio with Z. Cecilia Lu: