The Cleveland Institute of Art, previously Cleveland School of Art, is a private college focused on art and design and located in Cleveland, Ohio. History The college was founded in 1882 as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women, at first attended by one teacher and one pupil in the sitting room of its founder, Sarah Kimball. The school moved several times, first to the attic of the Old Cleveland City Hall, then to the Old Kelly homestead on Wilson Avenue (now East 55th Street). Having become a co-educational school, it was renamed the Cleveland School of Art in 1892. After unsuccessful attempts to merge the school with Western Reserve University, the school became independent. In the fall of 1905, the first classes were held in a newly constructed building at the corner of Magnolia Drive and Juniper Road in Cleveland's University Circle. Beginning in 1917, the school offered classes for children and adults on weekends and in the summer. The school participated in the WPA Federal Art Project during the Great Depression (1930s). Medical drawing and mapmaking were added to the curriculum during World War II (1939-1945). The school began offering a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1947 and it became the Cleveland Institute of Art the following year, in 1948. The college gradually incorporated more academic courses into the curriculum, while retaining its key objective to offer practical training. In 1956 the school moved to a new building on East Boulevard that it would name for George Gund II, who served as the college's board president and generous patron from 1942 to 1966. In 1981 the college acquired the former Albert Kahn designed Euclid Avenue assembly plant which was built by Ford in 1914-1915 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. Cleveland Institute of Art named the building the Joseph McCullough Center For Visual Arts following remodeling. In early 2013, CIA announced it would sell its East Boulevard building to the Cleveland Museum of Art and Case Western Reserve University. In 2015, the college unified its operations at the Euclid Avenue site, where it completed construction of an 80,000-square-foot building adjoined to the McCullough Center on the west, and also named for George Gund II. This new George Gund Building houses: the Peter B. Lewis Theater, the new home of CIA's year-round, nationally acclaimed Cinematheque film program; the Reinberger Gallery for public