Art school · Chandigarh, Chandigarh
Government College of Art, Chandigarh
An art college that traces its line to Lahore's Mayo School of Art, founded in 1875 and re-formed in India after Partition. It sits in Le Corbusier's cultural complex beside the city museum.
See first
- The Dhanraj Bhagat Sculpture Park on campus
- The S. L. Prashar Art Gallery
- The Government Museum and Art Gallery next door
- Le Corbusier's Sector 10 buildings
The college has two birthdays. The first is 1875, when the British set up the Mayo School of Industrial Art in Lahore, with John Lockwood Kipling as its first principal. That school remained in Pakistan after Partition and is now the National College of Arts. The second is 16 August 1951, when a Government School of Art and Craft opened in Shimla, then the capital of Punjab, on the Lahore model.
When Chandigarh became Punjab’s capital, the school moved there, in 1962, to Sector 10. Its neighbour is the Government Museum and Art Gallery, and the campus is part of a cultural complex designed by Le Corbusier. Its first principal in Chandigarh, and its founder, was S. L. Prashar; the college gallery, opened in 2012, carries his name. The Dhanraj Bhagat Sculpture Park, set up in 2010, gives students an open-air workshop.
It teaches painting, sculpture, printmaking and applied art. Alumni include Sohan Qadri, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Vibha Galhotra and the duo Thukral & Tagra.