The Glasgow School of Art is an international community with a shared visual language. Open and outward looking, our role as one of the UK’s leading higher education institutions for the visual creative disciplines is to, through studio-based learning and research, collaborate and transform thinking by developing creative approaches with new audiences
The ability to transform thinking, generate new knowledge and give shape and form to things that currently do not exist, are all the characteristics of the creative practitioner. Through art school education, we hone these inherent skills through studio-based learning and research that is discipline specific.
The studio creates the environment for collaboration, within and across disciplines, for critical inquiry, experimentation and prototyping, and is the environment in which we collectively generate new ideas and solutions and where innovation thrives. Studio, be it literal or figurative, is the space where a shared visual language can transcend barriers and boundaries and where ambition and imagination can find solutions to the global challenges facing the world today.
The global role of creativity and culture cannot be underestimated. Graduates of The Glasgow School of Art, whether they studied at our campus in Glasgow, or in our sister campuses in the Highlands and Islands or Singapore, are influential, successful and impactful creative practitioners who help make the world a better place.
It is something that we have been doing since 1753 and the opening of the Foulis Academy, a forerunner institution of the GSA. Offering a European-style creative training to Scottish artists at the height of the Enlightenment, it was followed in 1845 by the opening of the Glasgow Government School of Design at a time when Glasgow was an international industrial power-house.
Today we are The Glasgow School of Art. Today, the city of Glasgow is recognised as a European cultural capital and one of the UK’s most successful city-economies. Central to this success is the role of The Glasgow School of Art, with over 61% of its staff engaged in research of international and national significance (source: REF 2014), and its graduates, many of whom choose to stay in the city that has become home over the course of their studies. Together, through collaboration, innovation and their international networks, they contribute to Glasgow’s cultural, creative and economic vibrancy and opportunity.
