Many in Westchester County probably know Biagio “Gino” Civale as an artist working in a variety of media but especially painting. After all, he’s had 70 one-man shows and participated in more than 200 group shows on five continents over 70 years. More than 140 of his works hang in municipal buildings in Yonkers, where he makes his home with wife Lu. (It was she who gave him the nickname “Gino,” short for “Biagino,” a familial term of endearment.)
But despite a seven-decade-long commitment to art, it was always a side gig from a business standpoint, he said: “I never had a need to make a living as an artist.”
That’s because he made a good living in telecommunications, arbitration and translation that would involve him with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the New York State Unified Court System and various corporations.
It’s an unusual story, this particular nexus of culture and commerce, whose seeds were sown in Rome, where Civale was born to Southern Italian parents. But he would spend his early years in a place whose name is not unfamiliar to Americans – Benghazi, Libya – where his father was in the Italian Air Force. (At that time, the 1930s, Libya was an Italian colony.) One of his earliest memories, age 5, is of a Muslim holy man, seated in contemplation, whom he would later see in a photograph. The holy man would become the inspiration for Civale’s “Prayer at Bengasi” (Italian spelling), an oil on canvas in rich reds, greens and yellows.
Navigating hot and cold wars
At the height of World War II, 1943, an 8-year-old Civale returned to Italy with his splintered family. His father had been taken prisoner of war by the Allies in North Africa and wouldn’t be reunited with his family until 1947, while Civale, his mother and his sister hid in the mountains outside of Florence.
“I was exposed to the horror of war,” said Civale, whose memories of that time would spur him to depict the world’s dispossessed – Holocaust victims, refugees, Vietnam War orphans – and moments of conflict, including 9/11 and most recently the war in Ukraine.
But that was all in the future. As a 12 and 13 year old, Civale, like all Italian schoolchildren, studied drawing – “still lifes. I was not good, and I couldn’t have cared less.” At 15, he turned down a job as a scenery painter. Instead, he studied law at the University of Florence and business and commerce at the University of Pisa. Drafted into the Italian Air Force, Civale served for seven years in support on the ground, rising to the rank of captain.
His military background would serve him well in the postwar years, dominated by the Cold War between the West and its former ally, the Soviet Union. He was hired by the NATO Maintenance and Supply Agency (NAMSA) in France, holding various telecommunications positions. He then moved on to SHAPE – the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, NATO’s military nerve center in the village of Casteau, near Mons, Belgium – working with mobile satellite equipment in 15 member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (NATO now has 30 members.) “That was probably the most important job I ever had,” recalled Civale, who also worked as an administrative assistant for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a major project installing intermediate range missiles in Southern Italy to face Eastern Europe, then under Soviet control.
Parallel lives
In 1969, Civale came to the United States to serve as vice president and general manager of Solari America, a New York City-based subsidiary of Solari di Udine, a manufacturer of watches, clocking terminals and public information display boards for trains and airports. For five years in a row, he said, the company captured 80% of the American market for large display systems.
Civale would go on to international marketing positions with such companies as Timeplex in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey; General DataComm in Oxford, Connecticut; Universal Data Systems (UDS Motorola) in Huntsville, Alabama; and Data Storage Corp. in Melville on Long Island.
Civale’s facility for languages – he is fluent in English as well as Italian, with a working knowledge of French and has even negotiated Brazilian contracts in Portuguese – made him a natural for international business and parallel work in the field of arbitration.
In 1971, he was asked to join the American Arbitration Association – a nonprofit that bills itself as the largest provider of arbitration, mediation and other alternative dispute resolution (ADR) services. He became part of the NASDAQ team of arbitrators, handling New York Stock Exchange cases, among many others, including those that would be absorbed into FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Even in retirement, he continues to work with the New York State Unified Court System as an official Italian interpreter.
“My father refused to learn English,” Civale remembered of a man who was, after all, a POW of the Allies. “Some cannot do it.”
But Civale sees his linguistic skills as an opportunity to do good – helping out an Italian-speaking gardener in a dispute, for example. He views his parallel life in art the same way. Self-taught until age 23, he earned a diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He has studied sculpture at Purchase College, State University of New York, and printmaking at New York University in Manhattan. Just as he’s interested in a range of media, his works encompass both representation and abstraction. And while art sales may account for a portion of his income, he’s donated many works to organizations like New York Medical College in Valhalla and auctions.
Civale credits wife Lu – with whom he shares two children and two grandchildren – for enabling him to balance his day job and paint on evenings and weekends. But this balance may owe something to his own modest philosophy of life as well.
“Look at us,” Civale said, reminding this reporter that we first met some 40 years ago. “Life is a circle.”
One enriched by experience. For him that has made all the difference. Or as he put it:
“A large number of experiences in a variety of fields made me a solid assistant and operator in an ever-changing society and environments.”
For more on Biagio “Gino” Civale’s work in art, arbitration and translation, email him at gcivale@gmail.com.
