The SMFA Building

When it first opened in 1876, The School of Drawing and Painting (which later changed its name to the School of Museum of Fine Arts) was part of the MFA Boston. Initially, its classrooms were located in the basement of the museum in a Gothic Revival building that was “all the rage” in Boston’s Copley Square. 

The school changed locations again when the MFA Boston moved to its permanent location on the Fenway, an urban parkway, making its home in a temporary building that offered space for in-house studios. But as the school grew in the number of students and its reputation, it became increasingly clear that it required a permanent home that was wholly focused on educating artists.

In 1925, the school hired Guy Lowell, the same architect that designed the MFA Boston building, to design two buildings for SMFA: "a three-story Georgian structure of Harvard brick" on Evans Way for classrooms and a second building on Museum Road which would include studios, an exhibition hall, a library, and gallery space. The school’s architecture was meant to be directly inspired by and even in deference to the museum and its more imposing building down the street. 

The permanent SMFA building was completed in 1928, opening its doors in time to celebrate the school's fiftieth birthday. Its location was carefully positioned at the epicenter of the city's art scene, next to the MFA Boston, diagonal to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and within walking distance to Massachusetts College of Art and Design (then called the Massachusetts Normal Arts School) and the Boston Architectural College (then known as the Boston Architectural Club). Patrons of Boston's arts scene contributed casts, paintings, a bronze bas-relief in tribute to Otto Grundmann (the school’s first director) and 13 framed drawings of the Boston Public Library and MFA Boston by John Singer Sargent. The art museum lent works from its permanent collection. More than 800 volumes were donated by various benefactors to launch the SMFA library collection.

Sixty years later, a 1988 renovation and expansion of SMFA's 230 the Fenway building, designed by architect Graham Gund, doubled the size of the school, adding an auditorium for visiting artist lectures, a larger library and galleries, a new cafeteria, and the Katherine Lane Weems Atrium connecting the two existing buildings (often referred to as the A and B buildings). It was with this expansion that SMFA was transformed into a school with a building that was purpose-built to serve its community’s specific needs–more than as a miniature ode to the surrounding architecture along the Fenway. 

Bess, the famous rhinoceros statue gracing the school’s front entrance, was donated by MFA Boston at this time. Katharine Lane Weems, the 14-foot-long fiberglass sculpture's creator, was born in Boston in 1899 and attended the SMFA in 1918. Bess continues to welcome anyone who walks through the doors to this day. 

The Atrium quickly became the scene of avant garde performances, often led by students, faculty, and alumni, such as Mobius Art Group, a Boston-based artist-run collective formed in the 1970s, and Kaiju Big Battel, a performance group formed in the 1990s that staged wrestling matches with characters and costumes borrowed from kaiju-style monster films of Japan.

“One of the things that I love about this building is how much natural light there is,” says Scheri Fultineer, Dean of SMFA. “Light is critical to so many artistic practices and if I had to pick one space that is critical to SMFA it would be the Atrium. Every day I see students there with their sketchbooks, having conversations, eating meals, and meeting with faculty there. It’s the spatial bedrock of our community.”  

In 2025, SMFA added pops of neon along with signage that, while playful, unified the building with school-specific branding. Generations of students, faculty, and staff have come together in the SMFA building to create, question, and share art with Boston residents. Its walls and its hallways contain echoes of every story about the evolution of generations of artists at work and play. 

Image: Drawing of SMFA Atrium, circa 1970s. UA133.001686. School of the Museum of Fine Arts records, UA133, Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), Medford MA.