Vicksburg native Andrew Bucci will be honored next month for his achievements in art.

On June 9, the 90-year-old will receive one of two lifetime achievement awards presented this year by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

“It’s very nice, and I appreciate it,” Bucci said.

Despite the upcoming award, Bucci is humble about his accomplishments, mostly in abstract-modern work, and said fellow honoree 84-year-old Sam Gore of Clinton is much more suited for the award than himself.

Gore, a Mississippi College art professor, is known for his sculptures that have brought high acclaim nationwide.

“He’s very much deserving of it, I think,” Bucci said.

In 2009, when Bucci received Mississippi Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts, he expressed similar sentiments about his former teacher, Mary Clare Sherwood. Bucci took his first art classes from Sherwood at All Saints’ Episcopal School.

“She was an American Impressionist painter and she was good,” Bucci said.

Arthritis and carpal tunnel syndrome now severely limit Bucci’s artistic production, but in decades as an artist he’s produced a number of highly praised works in paint, ink and needlepoint.

In the 1930s, Bucci began studying with Marie Hull in Jackson and continued to do so after he went to college at Louisiana State University to study architecture and engineering. Bucci said he never wanted to study engineering but did so at the insistence of his parents.

“When I finished high school I was still 16 and I wanted to go study art but they said no to that,” he said. “In those days boys studied engineering and girls went into education.”

When World War II came, Bucci was drafted and went into meteorology. That gave him the opportunity to study at New York University before going to France and England to serve as a meteorologist.

His service there provided him the opportunity to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. It also paved the way for his career with the with National Meteorological Center bureaus in South Carolina and Washington, D.C.

Since his retirement in 1979, Bucci has stayed in Maryland, but visits Vicksburg occasionally.

“Everybody wants to know why I stayed in Maryland, and I tell them that’s where my stuff is. Your stuff rules the world,” Bucci said.

After the war, Bucci enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1952 and a master’s degree in 1954.