Limerick School of Art and Design
| Limerick School of Art and Design | |
 |
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| Established | 1852 |
|---|---|
| Head Of School | Mike Fitzpatrick |
| Students | 927 |
| Address | Limerick, Ireland, Limerick, Ireland |
| Website | www |
Limerick School of Art and Design or LSAD is an art college in Limerick city in Ireland. The school is one of the five constituent schools of Limerick Institute of Technology and operates on two of LIT's campuses in Limerick city, located on Clare Street and George's Quay; both are about 2 km from the main LIT campus at Moylish Park. Since 2012, the school also offers degree programmes at the Clonmel campus of LIT. The School can trace its origins back to 1852 and has had a number of guises and locations before consolidating into its current format and campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. LSAD offers courses at Level 8 (Honours Degree) and Level 9 (Master's Degree) across a range of art and design disciplines.
On 3 July 1852, a public notice appeared in the Limerick Chronicle announcing the opening of the School of Ornamental Art at the Leamy Institute on Hartstonge Street. The school offered instruction to the general public in drawing and modelling. The first prospectus stated the school's objective of "providing instruction in all those branches of art which are applicable to manufactures and decoration". The school opened on 2 November 1852 with 28 male and seven female pupils.
Although the school thrived in its first year, changes in government departments led to a withdrawal of funding and the school was forced to close in January 1855. Following public pressure, the school reopened in December 1855 under the auspices of the Limerick Athenaeum, a centre of learning that would be open to all, irrespective of class, creed or cultural background. This had opened in February 1855 at No. 2 Upper Cecil Street. The school continued to operate successfully over the coming decades. The trustees of the Athenaeum handed the building over to the Corporation in 1896 in order to administer the property for the advancement of technical education in Limerick. However, by the turn of the century, the building was no longer large enough to cater for the range of courses offered by the Limerick Technical Instruction Committee, and the school began to move sections to new premises, mainly on George's Street (now O'Connell Street).
The departments were eventually rehoused on one site with the opening of the Municipal Technical Institute on O' Connell Avenue in December 1911. This building has since been known in Limerick as the 'Red Tech'. The work of the Institute was taking place against the background of intense political change in Ireland and was forced to close from 1919 to 1923. Troops of the Warwickshire Regiment occupied the Institute during the Irish War of Independence in 1921 and considerable damage was caused to the building and its contents. Limerick MTI eventually re-opened in October 1923 and such was the impact of the closure that it was effectively a new start-up.
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