The school was established in 1970 as Montserrat School of Visual Arts and offered a diploma program. The school was founded by the North Shore Community Arts Foundation, a civic group that managed the North Shore Music Theatre. Gloucester artist and former head of the Fine Arts Department at New England School of Art and Design Joseph Jeswald was chosen to serve as the school's first president and North Shore Music Theatre founder Stephen Slane was named managing director. The school was accredited as a college and authorized to award the bachelor of fine arts degree in the mid-1980s, at which time it changed to its current name. In 1992 the school moved to its present location off Cabot Street on Essex Street in the Hardie Building, a renovated 19th century school building that serves as the center of the campus. In 2016, the college campus consists of twelve academic and residential owned or leased buildings in and around historic, downtown Beverly, MA, a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. In early 2015 Montserrat College of Art explored a possible merger with Salem State University, a much larger public institution in a neighboring city. After some months of research and negotiations the proposal was found to be not feasible and the plan was dropped in summer 2015.
Campus
Currently, the campus includes the central Hardie Building located on 23 Essex Street; 248 Cabot street, which is home to liberal arts courses, senior illustration studios, and administrative offices; the 301 Gallery which is home to senior studios and the Sculpture department; and apartment-style residence halls. A residence hall, the Helena J. Sturnick Student Residence Village, was also constructed and opened for the start of the fall 2009 semester. The school emphasizes the positives of its small size, which allows more academic attention to the progress of each individual student. Montserrat has an active student body of 370 students as of Fall 2018.
Academics
Montserrat offers Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees, along with optional Creative Writing, Art History, and Art Education minors. It also offers non-credit classes for adults and teens, and for-credit summer programs for high school students. A S.T.E.A.M. program, an educational approach to learning that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics as access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking, is offered in the summer to students in grades three through eight. The college also has articulation agreements with several community colleges. The college has study abroad programs in Viterbo, Italy; Mallorca, Spain; Niigata, Japan; and Cusco, Peru, and occasional other sites. Each study abroad program lasts around one month overseas, and features different kinds of classes for students, ex. in Niigata students study printmaking and in Viterbo students study En plein air illustration.
Art exhibitions and displays
Montserrat is home to four, public galleries which are free and open to the public. The galleries exhibit works by international, national, regional and local artists and each exhibition provides opportunities for the public to meet and hear the artists discuss their work. The college has been hosting the 6th Essex District Congressional High School Art competition since 1995. The competition is open to all public, private and home-schooled students in grades 10-12 and the work of each year's winner is sent to Washington DC to be displayed at the capitol for the following year. Every spring the college holds a fundraising art art auction, the college's major event benefiting student scholarship. The college galleries exhibit the work of prominent international, national and regional contemporary artists and offer free lectures and events intended to take art education beyond the college's classrooms.
