Grucci, Sibyl Barsky.

Sibyl Barsky Grucci (b. 1905) had a long career as a sculptor based first in Pittsburgh and later in State College, Pa. Barsky began to show her work in the Pittsburgh area in the early 1930s. At the suggestion of Samuel Rosenberg, Barsky taught art during one summer term at the Irene Kaufman Settlement. In the late 1930s Barsky was employed as part of the Pittsburgh Group of the Federal Art Project, a program of the Works Progress Administration. On September 24, 1940, Sibyl Barsky married Joseph L. Grucci, a poet and professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and then at Penn State University in State College, Pa. Sibyl Barsky Grucci worked in clay, wood, stone, and bronze. Her sculpture has been exhibited in Pittsburgh and other cities in the northeastern United States. Many of her works were commissioned privately and are now in private collections throughout the United States. A notable public installation is a bronze bust of Fred Lewis Pattee, a popular Penn State professor; the bust is in the foyer of the Penn State library named after Pattee. The Grucci Poetry Center at Penn State, endowed by Sibyl after the death of her husband has become the home of "The Young Dancer", a limestone piece first exhibited at the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Show in 1935. Grucci's bronze bust of Hyman Blum is on display at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in Pittsburgh.