The Sawtooth School for Visual Art traces its history to 1945 when the Junior League, the Winston-Salem school system, and the City Recreation & Parks Department joined forces to create the Arts and Crafts Workshop.
Over the years, the organization has been housed in several different locations under a variety of names, but its mission to provide high-quality craft and visual art instruction to all members of the community has never changed.
The Arts and Crafts Workshop occupied the old West End School at the corner of Fourth and Broad streets for its first few years. From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, it operated out of the James G. Hanes Community Center on Coliseum Drive.
In 1949, the Winston-Salem Arts Council was formed, the first locally established arts council in the United States—a clear sign of Winston-Salem’s long-standing commitment to the arts.
This complex was developed to consolidate the Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, Arts Council and the United Fund (which later became the United Way), along with several of those organizations’ funded members.
In 1982, the school relocated to its current location, the iconic Sawtooth Building, and was renamed the Sawtooth Center for Visual Design. Built in 1911 by the Hanes Hosiery company under the name Shamrock Mills, the building housed the company’s first hosiery factory. Its distinctive jagged “sawtooth” shaped roofline with north-facing skylights maximized sunlight before the widespread use of electric lights. The building was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
In 2008, construction began on the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, a complex that would renovate and integrate the century-old building into a new façade facing Spruce Street.
The school reopened in 2010 under its current name, Sawtooth School for Visual Art, with renovated facilities that now include 15 studios in 20,000 square feet. The renewed facilities have allowed Sawtooth to expand its studios and programs to better serve the community.
Sawtooth will be celebrating its 79th birthday in 2024.
To help continue supporting this downtown institution for another 79 years, consider making a donation today.
