Salvatore Gulla, 90

Salvatore Gulla, an artist who taught for over 30 years at Intermediate School 139 in the Bronx and who came to East Hampton over 25 years ago, died of a heart attack at the 80th Street Residence, an assisted living home in Manhattan, on March 9. He was 90 years old. 

Mr. Gulla began painting in 1947, studying at the Art Students League of New York under Reginald Marsh, Morris Kantor, Vaclav Vitlacyl, among others. 

He was known as a diverse artist, who explored Cubism and Expressionism and had a classical approach to portraiture. He worked with watercolor and charcoal, was a sculptor, and also expressed himself artistically as a jeweler and a goldsmith.

In 1990, when he had a show of his work at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Laura Hoptman, the curator, wrote that all his works “reflect the surety of an adept hand and the sharpness of observation from a practiced eye.”

His most recent East End exhibition was at the Quogue Gallery. Earlier, his work was shown at galleries in East Hampton, Amagansett, and Greenport.

He was born in a walkup tenement in the South Bronx to Nicholas Gulla and the former Caterina Cilursa on May 10, 1927. His daughter Amanda Gulla said that he was proud of his birthplace, and that whenever he passed the building, “he liked to point at a window and say, ‘That’s where I was born.’ ” 

He spent most of his youth in the South Bronx, but also lived for a time in New Jersey. His mother died when he was 8 and his father took him to Calabria, Italy, for a year before returning to the Bronx. He attended Clinton High School there, followed by City College of New York and Columbia University, where he received a teaching degree. 

Mr. Gulla met his first wife at about the time he began studying art, in 1947. They married in 1949 and lived in Manhattan, where their first daughter, Katherine Gulla, was born. She now lives in Boston. In 1953, when their daughter Amanda Gulla was born, the family moved to the Bronx. She lives in Manhattan. 

In the early 1960s, Mr. Gulla created an organization that came to be known as the South Bronx Community Action Theater. “He believed in lifting kids up,” Amanda Gulla said. The theater would bring in artists from different disciplines from around the world to work with young people and encourage their participation in art. The organization is now part of the Hispanic Access Foundation. 

Mr. Gulla’s second wife was Joanne Conforti, who owned a house in Springs and lives in Manhattan. The couple began splitting their time between that house and their apartment in Manhattan. They later purchased a house on Cedar Trail in Northwest Woods. Retired from teaching, Mr. Gulla devoted his time to his art. “He was able to paint full time,” Amanda Gulla said. The East End and East Hampton gave him a rich source of material, and many of his later paintings were East End landscapes, she said. 

Besides his daughters, Mr. Gulla is survived by his wife. A memorial will be held for him on May 5 at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The family has suggested donations in his memory to the Center for Arts Education, 266 West 37th Street, New York 10018, or CenterForArtsEd.org