On 3 July 1852, a public notice in the Limerick Chronicle announced the opening of the School of Ornamental Art at the Leamy Institute on Hartstonge Street, offering instruction 'in all those branches of art which are applicable to manufactures and decoration.' The school opened on 2 November with 28 male and seven female pupils. It was part of a broader Victorian movement to bring industrial-design education to provincial cities - the same impulse that produced the South Kensington schools in London and similar institutions across the British Empire. The Limerick school thrived for a year, then was closed in January 1855 when government funding was withdrawn. Public outcry brought it back in December under the auspices of the Limerick Athenaeum on Upper Cecil Street, a centre of learning that explicitly opened itself 'to all, irrespective of class, creed or cultural background.' That principle - art education available to the working class, not just to gentry's daughters - has been the school's working ideology ever since.

In 1896 the Athenaeum's trustees handed the building to Limerick Corporation. By the turn of the twentieth century the courses had outgrown the space, and the various departments moved to George's Street - now O'Connell Street - and eventually consolidated in December 1911 at the new Municipal Technical Institute on O'Connell Avenue. Limerick called it the Red Tech for the colour of its brick. The Red Tech ran into the storm of the Irish War of Independence. Troops of the Warwickshire Regiment occupied the building in 1921, causing significant damage. The Institute closed from 1919 to 1923, the entire period of the War of Independence and the Civil War. When it reopened in October 1923 it was essentially starting from scratch. The Vocational Education Committee took it over in 1930, focused it on full-time education for 14-to-16-year-olds, and ran it that way until 1967 - when the VEC was suspended for three years over irregularities in staff appointments.

By the 1960s the School of Art needed more space and ambition than the Red Tech could offer. In 1962 it moved to the former County Infirmary and Nurses' Home in Mulgrave Street. In 1980, after another decade of growth, it formally became the Limerick School of Art and Design under the reconstituted College of Art, Commerce and Technology (CoACT), and relocated to George's Quay - to the building that had been St Anne's Vocational School from 1939 until 1978. George's Quay too proved too small. CoACT rented additional rooms in Bruce House on Rutland Street, in the Granary on Michael Street, and in five other properties scattered around the city. The school was, for a time, essentially a federation of borrowed spaces. When CoACT achieved Regional Technical College status in 1992, it could finally plan for a permanent home. It bought the Good Shepherd Convent on Clare Street in October 1994.

The convent had run a girls' reformatory next to it on the site of the demolished Thomond Brewery from 1879. It had run a Magdalene laundry on a third adjacent site - the old Farrancroghy execution ground - for over a hundred years. Magdalene laundries were institutions where unmarried mothers and other women the Catholic Church and the state deemed 'fallen' were confined and worked, often without pay, sometimes for decades. The Irish state apologised for the laundries in 2013; the Good Shepherd Limerick laundry was one of those covered by the apology. The LSAD bought the buildings in 1994 and refurbished them in stages: the main building and chapel in the late 1990s, additional space and a new Clare Street entrance completed in August 2008. The art school does not, on balance, pretend the previous occupants did not exist. Students who walk past the chapel walls every day are walking past stones that, within living memory, were part of a system of incarceration. Some of those former residents are alive. Their stories are being told, slowly, by others.

LSAD today is a constituent art college of the Technological University of the Shannon, with four departments - Fine Art and Education, Design, Digital Arts and Media, and Midlands Media and Design - operating on four campuses (Clare Street and Moylish in Limerick, Clonmel in Tipperary, Athlone). The undergraduate degrees include painting, printmaking, sculpture, visual communications, product design, fashion design, ceramic design, graphic design, creative multimedia, digital animation production, and game art and design. Around sixty postgraduate students are pursuing MA and PhD research projects at any given time. Notable alumni form a noticeably varied list: the performance artist Amanda Coogan; the painter Diana Copperwhite; the street artist Conor Harrington; the comics artist Declan Shalvey; the Oscar-nominated costume designer Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh; the actor and comedian Pat Shortt; the painter John Shinnors; the artist-musician David Chambers, better known as Blindboy Boatclub of the Rubberbandits. The Limerick School of Art and Design has been producing makers - of all kinds - for 173 years.