Kentucky College of Art + Design becomes first new independent art college to achieve institutional accreditation in several decades

‍December 16, 2024—LOUISVILLE, KY—Kentucky College of Art + Design (KyCAD) has been granted institutional accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). The official announcement came last week during the SACSCOC annual meeting in Austin, TX.

“What an impressive effort on behalf of the KyCAD team, its students, and its Board,” said Anthony Jones CBE, former President of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Rector of The Royal College of Art, London. “Accreditation is a multi-step process and reflects the quality of the work being done in this new Kentucky College of Art + Design.”

The accreditation announcement caps off an unprecedented year of growth and transformation for the Old Louisville-based school which recently increased its student population, received significant funding from both the City and State Governments, and added two new pathways within its interdisciplinary BFA program structure: one in Experimental Fashion + Performance, the other in Digital Fabrication.

This major accomplishment is notable for other reasons including the fact that it had been nearly 30 years since any new college of art and design in the U.S. successfully navigated the rigorous demands of achieving institutional accreditation. Recently the press has reported on a number of high-profile colleges of art and design that have closed. KyCAD swims against the tide as a new college coming through against all odds. KyCAD President Moira Scott Payne stated that “there is a space in arts higher education for a new spirit of possibility.”

“I think I am not alone in yearning for the badass convention,” Payne said. “The systems and requirements that maintain the standards, the equilibrium, the quality that we all expect and value, can also contain the iterative, responsive, complicated energies that have since Bauhaus days always defined the arts. So, how do we teach artists to reach out beyond convention when they work within highly prescribed structures and patterns that rely on quizzes, completed process, defined facts, linear learning when in fact the arts at their most vibrant reflect fluid culture, place, the planet, ethics, science, history, politics, human connection, inquiry, sensory knowledge, cross referencing modes of knowledge that traverse digital, virtual, textual and material learning? A small college of art and design in Kentucky is addressing the challenge of both the need for an endorsement of quality within a system well defined, with the potential of the arts to stretch into new territories of value and meaning.”

As it now stands, KyCAD is the only accredited independent 4-year college of art and design in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

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