Andrew Bucci

Andrew Bucci (born 12 January 1922) is a Mississippi-born artist residing in Maryland.

A native of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Bucci was influenced early in his career by Mississippi artist and teacher Marie Atkinson Hull, with whom he began studying in the late 1930s.

Bucci graduated from St. Aloysius High School in Vicksburg in 1938 and earned a degree in architectural engineering from Louisiana State University. After college, Bucci was trained as a meteorologist and served in World War II, which allowed him to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. With a passion for painting fueled by his European experience, Bucci enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago where he received a B.F.A. in 1951 and an M.F.A. in 1954. Between degrees he studied fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design (now known as Parsons The New School for Design).

Bucci has spent most of his career in Maryland and the Washington D.C. area, where he currently resides. He worked for the National Meteorological Center in Maryland from 1956 until his retirement in 1979. He continues to paint and produce artwork, and in more recent years, he has created a number of needlepoint reproductions of his paintings.

He has exhibited with the Society of Washington Artists and served as president of the Washington Watercolor Society.

Bucci designed the 5-cent United States Postal Service stamp marking the 150th anniversary of Mississippi statehood introduced on December 11, 1967.

Bucci is the recipient of the Mississippi Arts Commission 2009 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts for lifetime achievement in the visual arts.

His paintings have been viewed throughout the South for over half a century, beginning with the Mississippi Art Association in 1947 and including exhibitions at the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art in 1952, 1965 and 1979. His works have been part of numerous national and regional shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of Design and New Orleans Museum of Art, among others.

Bucci's works are included in the following collections: Arkansas Arts Center, Brooks Memorial Gallery, Mississippi Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), Florence Art Gallery (South Carolina), Municipal Art Gallery (Jackson, Miss.), Delta State University, Hinds Community College and Mississippi University for Women.

In 2007 Bucci donated a number of materials to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. The archive includes several of his own works of art, six figure drawings with fellow student H.C. Westermann modeling from a life drawing class at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1947–48; letters, postcards, and handmade holiday cards to Bucci from artists Anna Baker, Marie Hull, Dan Flavin, and Hosford Fontaine; and printed material regarding the artists and the Allison's Wells art colony in Way, Mississippi. Also included are printed material such as newspaper clippings, exhibition catalogs and announcements, brochures, programs and illustrated calendars.

Bucci's artwork may be viewed and/or purchased at Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, La. (www.coleprattgallery.com), Brown's Fine Art in Jackson, Miss. (www.brownsfineart.com), and Art Under a Hot Tin Roof in Memphis, TN.