Harold Zisla: the designer who built the city's art teaching

1925 – 2016 · South Bend from 1952 · Art Center director 1957 – 1966

Harold Zisla (1925–2016): Cleveland-born on June 28, 1925, he served in the Navy from 1943 to 1946, took a diploma in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1950 and bachelor's and master's degrees from Case Western Reserve, and in 1952 came to South Bend with his wife Doreen for a designer's job at Uniroyal's Ball Band division across the river in Mishawaka — the boundary printed plainly: the job was Mishawaka's; the home, and the life's work, were South Bend's. He directed the South Bend Art Center from 1957 to 1966 and stayed on its board; in 1966 he joined the faculty of Indiana University South Bend and in 1968 became the founding chair of its fine arts department, teaching there until his retirement in 1989. He was a professor emeritus, a winner of IU's all-university Amoco teaching award, and the first Eldon Lundquist Faculty Fellow, in 1985.

The turn: Zisla was trained as a representational painter and painted portraits for years — Tuck Langland and his wife sit for him in the Langland Collection — before, in his fifties, he abandoned representation for abstract expressionism, and worked in that vein for more than thirty-five years. The estate his children have cataloged since his death runs to thousands of drawings — his doodles and caricatures drawn through decades of meetings were famous among his colleagues — and some six hundred paintings came out of the attic of the family home alone. His work stands in nearly twenty Midwestern museum and university collections; his family records that he remains the only artist given a retrospective in the South Bend Museum of Art's first seventy-five years. Since 2016 his children, Beverly Zisla Welber and Paul Zisla, have placed his paintings across the Indiana University campuses and published Provocative Lines (2021), a book of his drawings. He died on March 18, 2016, aged ninety.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, "IU South Bend professor emeritus of art Harold Zisla dies at 90" (March 2016) — the 1952 arrival for the Ball Band Uniroyal design post, the 1957–66 Art Center directorship, the 1966 faculty appointment, the 1989 retirement, and the March 18, 2016 death.
2. Harold Zisla biographical record (prabook, from the standard artist directories) — the Cleveland birth of June 28, 1925, the Navy service, the 1950 Cleveland Institute diploma, the Case Western Reserve degrees, the founding chairmanship of 1968, and the first Eldon Lundquist Fellowship.
3. Harold Zisla estate, "The Life and Art of Harold Zisla" (haroldzisla.com; Zisla family statement, 2018) — the turn to abstraction in his fifties, the thousands of drawings and the six hundred attic paintings, the retrospective claim, the placements across the IU campuses, and Provocative Lines.
4. South Bend Museum of Art, "Becoming SBMA" (southbendart.org) — the Zisla Acquisition Fund.