Picture three students and one teacher gathering here in January 1879 for the school's very first class. Founded in 1879 as the Columbus Art School, it is one of the oldest private art and design colleges in the United States. Today the campus fills nine acres with eleven buildings, including two residence halls, and sits adjacent to the Columbus Museum of Art.
About nine hundred full-time students study here. Its story began the year before, in 1878, when a group of women formed the Columbus Art Association and set their sights on an art school. The first day of classes was January 6, 1879, on the top floor of the Sessions Building at Long and High.
That floor had been donated by Francis Sessions, an art-minded banker and entrepreneur who became one of the first trustees of the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts. On that first day there were three students and one teacher; by the end of the school year enrollment had grown to 118. Original classes included drawing, watercolor, art needlework, oil painting, clay modeling, china painting, and mechanical...
Eleven buildings on nine acres now make up the campus, with the Columbus Museum of Art as next-door neighbor.