"A leading force during the Conceptual art movement, NSCAD became an international creative hub highlighting an experimental and collaborative approach to the artmaking process." — Garry Neill Kennedy

Beginning as a nondescript art school in 1887, nothing about this small Halifax institution presaged the enormous international influence that the school would exert when Garry Neill Kennedy took over as NSCAD's president in 1967 at age 32. The school's subsequent and unprecedented creative direction must be credited to Kennedy, who (with a budget of $62,000) turned the school away from its previous provincialism toward the influential, international posture it would maintain for the next decades. This stature was due in no small part to the faculty and visiting artists that Kennedy brought to the school, including Vito Acconci, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Frank, Robert Morris, Dara Birnbaum, Seth Seibelaub, Lucy Lippard, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Eric Fischl, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Beuys, and Claes Oldenburg, among many others. The geographical location of NSCAD on the transatlantic route between New York and Europe aided in its access to the international scene. This brought many visiting artists who, instead of appearing only for a talk or lecture, used the opportunity for longer residencies, exhibitions, and collaborations with the school. Notably, Joseph Beuys's first trip to North America was not to New York, but to Halifax, as a visiting artist at NSCAD.

During its heyday between the late '60s and '70s, NSCAD's teaching philosophy radically changed. Starting with the removal of a lettered grading system, NSCAD became the first degree-granting art school in Canada, advocating an intense engagement on all ends of the art-making spectrum between professional and student artists. NSCAD also documented its own significance through the publications of its press, as well as the numerous invitations and catalogues produced by its galleries in conjunction with the shows and exhibitions it mounted during this period. This combination of publications, exhibitions, and collaborations generated by the school in many ways made it a contemporary Black Mountain College — and its subsequent influence has proved no less significant. Indeed, in 1973 ART IN AMERICA proclaimed NSCAD "the best art school in North America," and thirty-five years later a major exhibition (at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia) and publication (by MIT Press) wryly celebrated NSCAD as "The Last Art College."

The NSCAD Press began operations in 1972. Initially led by Kaspar Koenig, and then by Benjamin Buchloh, the Press published 26 titles between 1982 and 1987, including now rare and important works by Jenny Holzer, Steve Reich, Michael Snow, Donald Judd, Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Gerhard Richter, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, and others. All are present in this collection — many in their rare hardcover editions.

The collection also documents two other canonical aspects of NSCAD. The first, the "Projects Class," was developed by David Askevold, one of Kennedy's new young hires. In the spirit of the school's new direction of dismantling traditional teaching methods, the class invited artists to submit proposals for students to undertake under the artists' guidance. A rare complete set of cards documenting the first instantiation of this class from 1969 is present in its original envelope and includes submissions from artists Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, James Lee Byars, Jan Dibbets, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Lucy R. Lippard, and Robert Smithson, among others.

The collection also includes materials from the Lithography Workshop, under the direction of Gerald Ferguson (who had insisted on hiring Askevold). The workshop's goal was not only to train students in printmaking, but to produce prints for renowned artists both local and international. It allowed a space for NSCAD students to develop alongside professional artists, taking their printmaking from initial concept to final execution. The workshop encouraged exploration of mediums and invited not only visual artists but performers, writers, dancers, musicians, and other famous and emerging creatives to make one-off projects. More than half a dozen pieces explicitly attributed to the workshop are present, including work from Emmett Williams, Huebler, and Lawrence Weiner.

But perhaps the most significant components of this collection are the ephemeral documents (invitations, flyers, postcards, posters, catalogues) produced by NSCAD's legendary Mezzanine Gallery, which operated between 1970 and 1973 under the directorship of Charlotte Towsend-Gault. This remarkable program produced ground-breaking contemporary art projects, exhibitions, events, and residencies by such artists as Bas Jan Ader, Dan Graham, John Baldessari ("I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art"), Tony Shafrazi, Eleanor Antin, Charlotte Moorman, Sol LeWitt, Martha Rosler, Donald Judd, On Kawara, Martha Wilson, and many others. These are almost to an item uncommon, with most scarce, and many quite rare. As a group, the roughly 90 Mezzanine Gallery items included here would be virtually impossible to reassemble now. In 2006, Printed Matter (NYC) presented an exhibition of this material under the curatorship of AA Bronson. The present collection includes not only all of the material shown in that exhibition, but other documents acquired subsequent to it.

The collection also includes later ancillary and reference materials. Taken as a whole, it documents all aspects of the most critical years at a key institution that served as both incubator and promoter for some of the most important and influential art in the second half of the 20th century.

Read more: Kennedy, The Last Art College.