Felix Ruvolo (1912–1992) was born in New York City and raised in Sicily by his grandparents until age twelve, when he rejoined his parents in Chicago and trained at the Art Institute of Chicago. He taught there from 1945 to 1948, working in a Surrealist, fantasy-influenced style alongside painters such as Gertrude Abercrombie, before his work was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s group exhibitions of 1947 and 1951. After a 1948 summer teaching session at Mills College in Oakland, he joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1950, becoming a central figure of the loosely defined “Berkeley School” of abstract painters alongside colleagues such as Erle Loran, John Haley, and Glenn Wessels, and moving toward large-scale, non-objective canvases influenced by Hans Hofmann and Clyfford Still. His students there included Walter De Maria and Mark di Suvero. He exhibited widely — at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the São Paulo Biennial, and in solo shows at New York’s Grand Central Moderns and Poindexter Gallery — and, with his son, the anthropologist Antonio Ruvolo, built a notable collection of ethnic art; most of his own early paintings and much of that collection were destroyed in the October 1991 Oakland-Berkeley hills fire. His work is held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Walker Art Center, among others. He died of cancer in 1992.