Brother Joseph McNally

 

Big Brother to the Arts

 

Ireland-born Brother Joseph McNally’s vision and steadfast belief in the merits of a multi-disciplinary arts school, which exists today as LASALLE College of the Arts, has paved the way for many talented youths to hone their skills and improve their employment prospects.

 

Brother Joseph McNally arrived in Singapore from Ireland in 1946 at the age of 23, as a member of the De La Salle Order of Christian Brothers. He started teaching at St Joseph’s Institution (SJI). From young, Brother Joseph had a talent for art. Just before coming to Singapore, he had won a nationwide competition where he drew a self-portrait using oil, his favourite medium at the time. In Singapore, he continued pursuing his passion, frequenting the Art Society every Tuesday evening, painting alongside the eminent Nanyang Style artists, Chen Wen Hsi and Liu Kang. After staying in Singapore for five years, Brother Joseph moved to Malaya. Throughout the 1950s, he taught at various schools affiliated to the De La Salle Order in Malaya. During the 1960s, he furthered his studies in Rome, Italy, and later in New York at Columbia University, where he obtained his master’s and PhD degrees.

Brother Joseph returned to Singapore to teach at St Patrick’s School in 1973. When he became principal two years later, he instituted radical changes like abolishing corporal punishment in the school, explaining that every child had his own nature which should be respected. He also fought to place arts education in the core curriculum, believing it to be crucial to the children's development. He remained the principal of St Patrick’s for eight years before retiring in the early 1980s.

Brother Joseph underwent cardiac bypass surgery in 1984. Instead of spending time resting and recuperating, he focused on realising his dream of starting an arts school. This was a bold endeavour and he forged ahead very much alone in this as the arts at that time did not yet figure highly on Singapore’s education agenda.

St Patrick’s Arts Centre occupied two classrooms on the premises of St Patrick’s School in the east of Singapore, and offered full-time studies in visual arts and music. When the school opened, it had 27 students. By 1985, enrolments had risen and a second campus at Telok Kurau was opened. St Patrick’s Arts Centre was named LASALLE College of the Arts and Brother Joseph became its first president. The same year, he became a Singapore citizen.

The going was not always easy for the school in the first decade. It chalked up debt that reportedly ran into the millions. Brother Joseph, in an oral history interview, said of himself, “I am a creative person, interested in creativity and not particularly interested in money.” Yet Brother Joseph was determined to carry his vision through to completion. He dug into his own pockets and financed the school from his retirement gratuity. The school fees that were collected went straight into paying the salaries of teachers. There were also other issues relating to bureaucratic restrictions over the hiring of staff who did not have the requisite paper qualifications and the initial difficulties the school faced in setting up a drama department, Brother Joseph recalled in his oral history interview.

In 1992, the college moved to a bigger space at what is now known as the Goodman Arts Centre. It was memorable for Brother Joseph, as the school finally had a home of its own.

In 1993, SIA donated $15 million to the school and this money went into clearing its debts and also into developing facilities like a library and a canteen. The school was renamed the LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts and in 2007, it became known as LASALLE College of the Arts.

As of 2014, LASALLE has about 2,700 students at its award-winning main campus in McNally Street and a second campus at Winstedt Road.

Brother Joseph was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal in 1997. He retired from his position as president emeritus of the school that year, but he remained active in education and art circles. His former students remember him as an inspiring teacher. Sculptor Victor Tan, one of his former students, said in a 2004 The Straits Times interview, “I can never forget how the door of his studio was always open to his students. He’d come and visit us in our own studios to see how we were doing.”

When Brother Joseph was not teaching, he would be sculpting and painting in his studio in LASALLE. When he sculpted, nothing else could take away his attention from his work. He would sometimes sit silently in front of a piece of wood and when asked what he was doing, he would reply, “I’m talking to the wood.” His sculptures are strongly influenced by what he saw in his homeland.

Brother Joseph grew up in a village called Ballintubber in County Mayo, Ireland. The archaeological sites in Ballintubber, mound-shaped with a cavernous centre, provided inspiration for the spiral shapes often seen in his sculptures.

In 2002, Brother Joseph died of a heart attack. Two years after his passing, Singapore erected a larger version of his sculpture “Counsellor II”, which depicts a teacher gazing upon a child, in County Mayo. The original sculpture is 90cm tall and the new version, 2.6 metres. Foreign Affairs Minister George Yeo, who met Brother Joseph at SJI and is a patron of LASALLE, led a 30-member delegation for the inauguration of the sculpture. The installation was to thank the Irish people for giving Brother Joseph to Singapore and to honour him for his contributions, he said.

The Irish Times reported in a posthumous article that Brother Joseph said in a documentary shortly before he died, “I would like to be remembered…as an educator in the classroom, as a principal of a school and as an educator through the arts...I would see myself really as an educator, first and last.” As Yeo said in the same article, “He played a seminal role in arts education. He dived in where angels feared to tread.”

References

“Carving a niche for himself,” Irish Times, April 2, 2003.

Clara Chow, “Heart at Work,” The Straits Times, July 10, 2004.

Clara Chow, “Thou ART remembered,” The Straits Times, 11 November 2002.

George Yeo, “Official Opening of the Brother Joseph McNally Exhibition Titled ‘An Invitation to Nature’” (Speech at the opening of Brother Joseph McNally Exhibition, Dublin, March 26, 2003), http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/view-html?filename=2003032701.htm.

“History and Milstones,” LASALLE College of the Arts, accessed December 2014,
http://www.lasalle.edu.sg/about/history-milestones/

Joseph McNally interviewed by Bonny Tan, January 9, 1997, accession number 001876/04, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.

Kana Shekaran, “Nature’s Inspiration,” The Straits Times, November 8, 1992.

“LASALLE Turns 30,” The Straits Times, November 4, 2014.

 

 

Brother Joseph Mcnally
Ireland, 1923-2002