Michael Venezia was born in New York in 1935 to a family of Italian immigrants. His father was Sicilian, his mother Neapolitan. Venezia grew up in New York; he studied with the Abstract Expres- sionists and frequented their Manhattan haunts. He took up a day job in the mailroom of MoMA, where Dan Flavin worked as a guard, Robert Ryman too, and Sol LeWitt at the school. They became life-long friends. “I went to the Art Students League of New York,” he recalled in 2019, “where Jackson Pollock had gone to school. I had a teacher who became a close friend, the only person I call my real teacher: Peter Busa. I lived at a time when New York was the centre of the art world.” (Philipp Hindahl, “The Pursuit of Happiness: Michael Venezia,” in Mousse Magazine, May 29, 2019.)