The College of Fine and Applied Arts is the place where many of Sudan's visual artists and musicians started their artistic education, and it is the foundation of modern art in Sudan.

The origins of establishing an art school in Sudan began in the 1930s, when art was first included in the educational programme by Bakht al-Rida (Ministry of Education). In the mid-1940s, artist and teacher Mr J.P. Greenlaw established the School of Design at the Gordon Memorial College, Khartoum. The school officially opened in 1947. This is regarded as the start of the development of modern art in Sudan, when painting or sculpture in the Western sense began to take roots. In 1951, the School of Design was moved to the Khartoum Technical Institute, and in 1971, it became the College of Fine and Applied Arts in the Sudan University of Science and Technology. The college now includes ten different departments.

Since its inception, the college had strong ties to art schools in the UK. It was visited by many deans and other notables from the UK between 1963 and 1977 to evaluate the performance of the students. After graduating, many college students went on to study in the UK. This opportunity to study their own artistic traditions came at a time when Sudanese nationalism was at its peak (1950s–1960s). On returning to Sudan, they began to define themselves as Sudanese artists and developed styles based in their own cultures, utilising the motifs and patterns of Sudanese Arabic calligraphy and craft works. The absence of a tradition in painting and sculpture left room for exploring indigenous cultures with a fresh vision and gave rise to new trends in contemporary Sudanese art.

Over the years, much of the college archive has been lost and damaged, due to the neglect of several governments, political restrictions, and a number of extreme floods. To prevent more of the archive being lost forever and to make the content more easily available, since 2020 the college has collaborated with Sudan Memory. A new digitisation unit was established as a permanent resource for the college, including the installation of scanning equipment and training of a student team, who then went on to digitise the archive materials.

Content from this collection will be available soon.