Anthony Velonis

Anthony Velonis
Anthony Velonis working on a poster matrix in Lowry Field, Denver, Colorado.
Born	(1911-10-23)October 23, 1911 New York
Died	October 29, 1997(1997-10-29) (aged 86) Glen Rock, New Jersey
Nationality	American
Known for	Silkscreen Printing
Spouse(s)	Elizabeth Amidon

Anthony Velonis (23 October 1911 – 29 October 1997) was an American painter and designer born in New York City who helped introduce the public to silkscreen printing in the early 20th century. He married Elizabeth Amidon, with whom he had four children.

While employed under the federal Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, Velonis brought the use of silkscreen printing as a fine art form, referred to as the "serigraph," into the mainstream. By his own request, he was not publicly credited for coining the term.

He experimented and mastered techniques to print on a wide variety of materials, such as glass, plastics, and metal, thereby expanding the field. In the mid to late 20th century, the silkscreen technique became popular among other artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.

Velonis was born into a relatively poor background of a Greek immigrant family and grew up in the tenements of New York City. Early on, he took creative inspiration from figures in his life such as his grandfather, an immigrant from the mountains in Greece, who was "an ecclesiastical painter, on Byzantine style." The eldest of four children, Velonis attended James Monroe High School in The Bronx, where he took on minor artistic roles such as the illustration of his high school yearbook. He eventually received a scholarship to the NYU College of Fine Arts, into which he was both surprised and ecstatic to have been admitted. Around this time he took to painting, watercolor, and sculpture, as well as various other art forms, hoping to find a niche that fit. He attended NYU until 1929, when the Great Depression started in the United States after the stock market crash.