Montserrat College of Art

The school was established in 1970 as Montserrat School of Visual Arts and was founded by the North Shore Community Arts Foundation, a civic organization that managed the nearby North Shore Music Theatre. Joseph Jeswald, a local artist and former head of the Fine Arts Department at New England School of Art and Design, was chosen to serve as the first president of the school and Stephen Slane, one of the founders of the Arts Foundation along with C. Henry Glovsky and Ruby Newman, was named managing director.[3] The school was accredited as a college and authorized to award a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the mid-1980s, at which time it changed to its name to the Montserrat College of Art. In 1992, the school moved to its present location on Essex Street in the Hardie Building, a renovated nineteenth-century school structure that serves as the campus center.