Corcoran School of Art
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| Type | Private |
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| Established | 1890 |
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Parent institution
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George Washington University |
| Director | Sanjit Sethi |
| Location | Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Campus | Urban |
| Website | corcoran.gwu.edu |
The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (originally the Corcoran School of Art and, before 2014, the Corcoran College of the Arts and Design), founded in 1890, is an art and design school in Washington, D.C., United States. In 2014, the formerly independent college and the Corcoran Gallery of Art closed, with school operations being assumed by the George Washington University (GWU), and the gallery collection given free to the National Gallery of Art.
The Corcoran School is part of GWU's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.
William Wilson Corcoran founded the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1869. Construction had begun at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in 1859, but shortly after the exterior work was completed, the Quartermaster General's corps of the Union Army occupied the building, setting up offices for the duration of the Civil War.
Work resumed immediately after the conclusion of the war, with Corcoran formally founding his gallery as an institution in 1869. The first special event held that year was a fundraiser for the completion of the Washington Monument. Corcoran's gallery welcomed its first visitors in 1874 and art students immediately flocked to the gallery, eager to sketch and paint copies of the collection's famous works.
In 1877 the painter E.F. Andrews (1835–1915) started offering the visiting students and artists formal instruction in two dimensional media for no cost to the student. In 1878 William Wilson Corcoran donated additional funding to be used to establish a school to be associated with the gallery. After Corcoran's 1888 death, a small building was built in 1889 for the purpose of the gallery's burgeoning identity as a place for education in the arts. In 1890 the school officially opened as the Corcoran School of Art.
By the 1890s, both the gallery and the school programs had outgrown their respective spaces. A new, larger building designed by Ernest Flagg was constructed in 1897 at New York Avenue and 17th Street, with the basement level dedicated to workshops and studios for the students, and an upper two floors given over to large gallery spaces. From 1897 to the 1930s, the school continued in a modest existence for art students interested in a museum school. By the 1930s, the school had begun expanding: commercial art classes, scholarships, children's courses, the library, ceramics facilities and courses, weekend classes and summer opportunities were added at this time.
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