Self-Portrait

Born in Benton County, Missouri. His parents, Fred and Jessie, were married in Kansas and subsequently settled in Bellflower, California. Stussy attended public schools, and upon graduation from Excelsior High School in 1939, attended Long Beach City College and Art Center in Los Angeles. He obtained his B.A. at UCLA in 1943, and returned to UCLA as a graduate student and teaching assistant after completing three years of service in Naval Intelligence during World War II. Stussy also attended the University of Southern California, where he obtained his M.F.A. in art in 1953. The art department was a fledgling program when Jan started teaching at UCLA in 1946. Stussy was the youngest member of the faculty that established the foundation for the present art curriculum. He was instrumental in making the UCLA art department one of the most important in the country. Many artists with national and international reputations did their undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA. Stussy's forty years of teaching included all the major undergraduate and graduate offerings. He made an important contribution in formulating the lower-division curriculum. While he taught many courses, his special loves were anatomy for the artist and drawing. For a number of years, he collaborated with the anatomy department in the School of Medicine, both for his own research and for the teaching of his life drawing classes. His classes often took field trips to the dissection laboratories. Another important teaching milestone in Stussy's record which impacted the Los Angeles art community was his contribution to the formulation of the University Art Extension Program. Largely through his efforts, it became one of the finest and one of the most ambitious adult extension programs in the state. In particular, he supervised all the course planning, assembled an outstanding faculty to teach the program, and introduced review procedures to maintain grading and teaching standards. Stussy's creative work won him national recognition. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the world and can be found in a number of important public and private collections. He worked constantly, producing an immense body of work that is still being catalogued. During his tenure at UCLA, he had forty-one solo exhibitions and participated in three hundred eighty-four group shows, including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Art Museum, the De Young Museum, the Wight Gallery and many others. His creative impulses involved him in a great variety of media, including poetry and film-making. In 1978, he won an Academy Award® for his documentary film GRAVITY IS MY ENEMY. This was a film about Mark Hicks, a quadriplegic who was one of Stussy's students. The film celebrates Mark's will and spirit in overcoming these handicaps, permitting him to paint and draw and to achieve considerable recognition for his creative work in the art community. Stussy's extensive body of work and memorabilia are part of the Jan Stussy Foundation. A biography of Stussy has been written by Professor Albert Boime of the Art History Department at UCLA.  Documentary (Short Subjects) 1977: GRAVITY IS MY ENEMY - Producer (w. John Joseph) 1 nomination, 1 Award