Biography

Following Biography written by R. M. Johnson M. C. Regan D. Shapiro on the University of California, Davis, website entitled Calisphere.
For Tio L. Giambruni, total and passionate involvement was a way of life. His students, friends, and associates all felt the enrichment of their lives from experiencing the depth of vitality and enthusiasm that Tio directed toward all his endeavors. To know and to work with him was to know the energy, love, and integrity that he put into creating, teaching, and living.

A long-time resident of the Bay Area, Tio was born August 30, 1925, in San Francisco. Growing up there he early became interested in art, concentrating on it in high school and college and receiving his M.A. in sculpture from the Berkeley campus in 1951. In 1946 he married Helen Leona Emery and after graduating from Berkeley spent ten years teaching art at the secondary level. During his entire adult life he remained involved in the artistic and cultural affairs of the Bay Area, exhibiting continuously and serving on many juries and selection panels for art exhibitions and awards. He helped found the Berkeley Gallery and for many years served on the Artist's Council of the San Francisco Art Institute.

By 1961, when he joined the Art faculty at Davis, he had also developed a reputation as a highly talented West Coast sculptor. At Davis, Tio was responsible for the sculpture program and facilities. Active with a group of Bay Area sculptors who were involved in a renewed interest in bronze-casting ideas and techniques, he established (at Davis) one of the first metal-casting foundries and curricula at any West Coast college or university. Working to give form to his images, Tio set up all the tools and apparatus, taught and trained the assistants needed, and developed his ideas into monumental cast sculpture. Along the way, hundreds of students and other artists became involved in the process, learning from Tio as he learned from his own artistic processes. The group activity, much like a Renaissance workshop, was a wonder to observe; especially, most dramatically, on the twenty-four-hour days when metal was being poured.

As an artist Tio came very close to filling the image of the Renaissance
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man, actively working in most sculptural media, painting, graphics, and even photography and film-making. However, during the decade of the sixties when he was involved in the metal casting and monumental sculpture, his enthusiasm, creativity, and production soared to invigorating heights. Tio's work characteristically showed his deep commitment to the creative paradox of order and impulse. Working with the flow of molten metal, he created monumental forms that seemed to grow in the landscape, whimsically and spontaneously, having the quality of instant crystal formation or of cell growth, like the push of new life. But this apparently spontaneous process of casting bronze and aluminum into flowing structures, piece by piece, required a clear, powerful sense of purpose.

One of Tio's particular gifts (given to us in his activity here) was the vitality of his humanity--an awareness of the long fetch of history that made this sort of Renaissance workshop grow naturally; of the deep pulse of organic evolution that made the images of his sculpture grow into living forms; and of the contemporary humors that produced the delightful ironies of massive machine forms produced by hard, primitive work. This human awareness finally appeared as graceful twentieth century monsters equally at home in shopping center malls and in the desert.

In late 1968 and early 1969 he was able to visit Italy, France, England, and Mexico and spent this time studying art works and techniques. From then until his untimely death on May 17, 1971, he was planning and making technical preparations for further monumental sculpture and was experimenting with combining painting and sculptural forms. These final explorations exemplify the essential elements of his life and work. He was fascinated by technical innovation and invention, but his strongest beliefs were in the integration of studying the past, working in the present, and projecting into the future.

He is survived by his wife, Helen, a son, Mark, and a daughter, Kim. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

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