Memphis College of Art
art school in Tennessee
Memphis College of Art (MCA) was a private art college in Memphis, Tennessee. It was in Overton Park, adjacent to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. It offered Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Fine Arts, Master of Arts in Art Education and Master of Arts in Teaching degrees. However, it faced significant financial challenges and closed in the spring of 2020.
History
The college opened on October 5, 1936, and was once housed in the James Lee House in Victorian Village. When the college opened, it was originally named the Memphis Academy of Art. Before becoming an independent college, it was initially named the James Lee Memorial Academy of Art and was funded by the Memphis Art Association. Their independence was declared after a dispute with the Memphis Art Association's director, Florence M. McIntyre, who disapproved of their acceptance of modernism. The school then officially opened as the Mid-South School of Fine Arts, soon renamed as the Memphis Academy of Art.
From 1959 until its closing, the main building of the college was Rust Hall in Overton Park, an award-winning example of mid-century architecture designed by Roy Harrover with his company, Harrover & Mann.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Memphis College of Art” is art school in Tennessee. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Memphis, College and school, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6815815. VIAF identifies the subject as 130302230. The Library of Congress control number is n88667000. Authority coordinates are 35.146, -89.994. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1936 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Memphis College of Art” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.