Awards

Bicentennial Medal - 2020

President's Medal for Excellence - 2018

Celebration of Academic Excellence

Bloomington, Indiana

Presenter: Michael A. McRobbie

Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) - 1972

Guggenheim Fellow - 1963

About Rudolph O. Pozzatti

When Professor Pozzatti first came to IU, the Fine Arts department was small. It was housed in Mitchell Hall with one intaglio press and two broken-down lithography proof presses. With these meager beginnings he built the IU printmaking program into one of the finest in the country. He ran this program alone, teaching etching and woodcut. After a Ford Foundation grant to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop he added lithography to the curriculum. He oversaw the growth of the program with the addition of two other faculty members until his retirement in 1991. His broad-minded approach to printmaking, to new methods, materials and techniques, and his own dedication to his work and profession have served the program well. All of his former graduate students continue to be active professionally.

Early in his career, he had one-man exhibitions at the Chicago Art Institute, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of over 100 museums including the Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery, Library of Congress, Chicago Art Institute, Cleveland Museum and Sheldon Memorial Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. The Archives of American Art has selected his work and papers to be inventoried, arranged and microfilmed for the future use of artists and researchers. He was commissioned to do editions of prints for the Print Commission, Rochester Print Society, Rochester, New York, 1998 and the Print Commission, Colorprint U.S.A., selected to represent the State of Indiana, 1998. In the Spring 2002, he presented a retrospective exhibit, A Printmaker's Odyssey, at the IU Fine Arts Museum in Bloomington. A 105 page illustrated catalogue accompanied the exhibit. The show went to the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences for the months of November and December 2002. He was the recipient of a grant from the Florsheim Art Fund in Tampa to assist with the publishing of the exhibition catalogue.

Professor Pozzatti has received numerous awards including Doctor of Humane Letters and the George Norlin Silver Medal for Outstanding Achievement, University of Colorado, Fulbright Grant, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Exchange Grants: Soviet Union 1961, Yugoslavia 1965, Brazil, S.A. 1974, Budapest, Hungary 1985. He also received the Indiana Governor's Award 1981, Ford Grant to Japan 1981 and Rockefeller Grant, Bellagio, Italy 1995.

Professor Pozzatti died on March 27, 2021 at the age of 96.