Harold Zisla
American artist
Harold Zisla (June 28, 1925 – March 18, 2016) was an American abstract expressionist painter and art educator. In 1968 he became the founding chair of the Fine Arts Department at Indiana University South Bend, where he taught until his retirement in 1989.
Early life
Zisla was born in Cleveland, Ohio. During his youth he took art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1932–1937), and he studied with painter Paul B. Travis at Council Educational Alliance (1938–40). In 1940 he won a scholarship to Young Artist Classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he took classes with Milton S. Fox, a painter and art historian who later served as editor-in-chief and vice president of Harry N. Abrams Inc., an art book publisher.
Zisla earned his high school diploma from East Technical High School in Cleveland in 1943. Following high school, he served in the United States Navy until 1946. He graduated from the Cleveland School of Art with a diploma in painting in 1950. The same year, he received his B.S. in art education at Western Reserve University. The following year he earned his M.S. in art education.
The public source identifies “Harold Zisla” as american artist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Harold, Zisla and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23562637. VIAF identifies the subject as 49063340. The Library of Congress control number is nr00000125. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1925, 2016, 1968 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harold Zisla” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.