It was a holiday weekend in Singapore and the six, organically shaped glass buildings of the Lasalle College of the Arts campus in the city’s cultural centre were mostly empty. But a series of vast galleries in the basement were busy as visitors toured the annual graduation show featuring the work of students in a number of disciplines including fine arts, design, film and animation.
With more than 2,300 students, Lasalle’s courses also include fashion, performance, music and creative writing and the college is now one of the leading art schools in southeast Asia, ranked in the top 100 globally for art, design and performing arts. But when it opened in 1984 with just 27 students, the college was the personal project of Joseph McNally, a De La Salle brother from Ballintubber, Co Mayo.
“When he retired as principal of St Patrick’s Secondary School in 1982, Br Joe felt there was still more he could do. He had one remaining dream upon retirement: to stay in Singapore and set up an arts college,” said Lasalle’s president Venka Purushothaman.
“His mission was to build a teaching and learning environment in the visual and performing arts that focused on nurturing creative excellence. Slowly but surely, Lasalle began to grow from strength to strength.”
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McNally joined the order as a teenager and it was while he was teaching at De La Salle College in Mallow, Co Cork that he started studying art at evening classes in the local technical college. He volunteered to work in Asia and arrived in Singapore in 1946 where he taught at St Patrick’s School, later becoming its principal.
He resumed his art studies in the 1960s, first in Rome and later at New York’s Columbia University, where he was awarded a doctorate in education for a thesis about establishing an art school in southeast Asia. When he returned to Singapore and St Patrick’s School, McNally also worked as an artist, first as a painter and later as a sculptor who became especially interested in the fusion of wood, glass and metal.
When the college opened in 1984 as the St Patrick’s Arts Centre, it was in rented buildings on the grounds of the school, funded by McNally himself from his own savings. The 27 students were enrolled in full-time diploma studies in painting, ceramics, sculpture and music.
Venka recalls McNally as “a deeply personable individual” who always offered a beer to anyone who visited his studio at any time of the day. But he was fiercely determined in pursuit of his dream of making the college a centre of excellence and skilful in extracting money from donors to fund its development.
McNally, who died in 2002, became a Singaporean citizen in 1985 and he is still honoured in the city-state, where the street outside Lasalle as well as the campus itself is named after him
“He was deeply passionate and assertive as to what was needed in the form of visual arts for a young, modernising Singapore. He ruffled feathers, but people appreciated his commitment to nation-building through art,” Venka said.
“I reacquainted myself with Br Joe when I joined Lasalle in 2000 as a lecturer. He had retired as president and was working in his studio on campus. He still mentored students on sculpting and conservation and was ever ready to serve as a guest of honour at all student exhibitions. He firmly believed that young people must be respected for their ideas and not be treated as being inexperienced. This is a virtue we uphold at Lasalle, where we have student representatives in all decision-making academic committees.”
Lasalle maintains academic partnerships with Trinity College Dublin and Technological University Dublin with student exchanges in film, music, design, and fine arts. Every year, the college organises Red Dot Green Dot, an event celebrating the cultures of Singapore and Ireland, in collaboration with the Irish Embassy and the Ireland Funds Singapore.
McNally, who died in 2002, became a Singaporean citizen in 1985 and he is still honoured in the city-state, where the street outside Lasalle as well as the campus itself is named after him. When Singapore’s president Tharman Shanmugaratnam met Pope Leo XIV in the Vatican last March, he presented him with a miniature bronze cast of one of McNally’s sculptures.
“Br Joe is known in Singapore as the founder of Lasalle, as a sculptor, and perhaps most importantly as an educator. A number of Singapore’s pioneer artists remember him as a significant mentor in their early careers. For over 50 years, he dedicated himself to nurturing young minds and fostering artistic talents,” Venka said.
“The values of care for the community, social justice and the transformative potential of the arts continue to undergird the educational philosophy of the college today.”
