The teaching line: who taught art here

1874 – present · departments, studios and classrooms

The university first: Formal art teaching on this ground begins with the university in the Notre Dame CDP, outside the city limits — a boundary this section states wherever it matters. Notre Dame hired the painter Luigi Gregori in 1874 and built its art instruction around him; the man and his murals stand in Artists, and what stands here is the institutional fact: the region's first art schoolroom was a university department, and the university art departments — Notre Dame's, Saint Mary's College's and Indiana University South Bend's — have anchored art teaching here ever since. Saint Mary's Department of Art teaches through the Moreau Art Galleries in the college's Moreau Center for the Arts — the Hammes and Little Theatre Galleries — whose published mission makes the galleries a teaching tool for the department, the college and, in its own words, the greater South Bend community at large. The classroom record before 1874 — the nineteenth-century academies and drawing teachers a river town of South Bend's age would be expected to have had — does not stand in the sources reached; the published local art histories, Susan Oberhausen and Jennifer Zimmerman's The Artistic Heritage of South Bend 1930–1970 (South Bend Art Center, 1987) and Fine Arts of the South Bend Region, 1840–2000, are the named pull for that pass, and this section prints the gap rather than a guess.

The community school: The second classroom was the city's own. The South Bend Art Center of 1947 was founded as a teaching institution — Carlotta Banta's bequest specified a place where children would come to look and to make — and teaching has remained the museum's working core: its studios enroll about a thousand students a year, its ceramics studio is described by the museum as the largest and most professional in northern Indiana, and its galleries run the region's Scholastic Art Awards — the school-art pipeline of the whole region passing, each year, through the museum's exhibition rooms. The same man ran both of the city's mid-century classrooms: Harold Zisla directed the Art Center from 1957 to 1966 and founded the art department at Indiana University South Bend, a double tenure that stands in his entry in Artists and is noted here because it is a fact about the system — for a decade, the community school and the university program were, at the top, one person's work. The line continues in the competition's classroom (the Fischoff's education program, below) and in the training pipeline of orchestras and the community music school.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame and Artists, banked — Gregori's hiring in 1874 and the university art department's founding generation.
2. Saint Mary's College, Moreau Gallery mission statement and Department of Art publications (saintmarys.edu) — the galleries' teaching mission for the department, the college and the South Bend community.
3. South Bend Museum of Art, "About" (southbendart.org) and the South Bend Tribune (August 27, 2026) — the studio enrollment of about a thousand students a year, the ceramics studio's standing as the museum describes it, and Zisla's directorship of 1957–1966.
4. South Bend Museum of Art and St. Joseph County Public Library reading lists — the two published local art histories named in the text, the 1987 volume and Fine Arts of the South Bend Region, 1840–2000.