In 1926, when the FAC was known as the Broadmoor Art Academy, it was the de facto Art Department of Colorado College. This was during an age when professional arts education was transitioning from professional art schools to accredited colleges and universities.

Alice Bemis Taylor originally planned to build a museum to house her collection on Colorado College’s campus. Instead, she joined forces with Julie Penrose and Elizabeth Sage Hare, who persuaded her to include this in a bigger Fine Arts Center vision and build a multidisciplinary arts institution.

In 1935, while the Fine Arts Center was under construction, the first art exhibition as the Fine Arts Center was held on the CC campus in Cossitt Hall.

In the late 1930s, the Fine Arts Center and Colorado College jointly hosted an annual Conference on the Fine Arts.

Upon the closing of CC’s museum in the 1960s (housed in Gates Common Room) a portion of the college’s collection of Southwest art and cultural objects was placed on long-term loan to the FAC.

CC is a long-standing institutional member of the FAC; each has mounted art exhibitions on the other’s behalf on a number of occasions, and joint programming has been presented often. Recent examples: “Indian Corner” explored stereotypes by placing Native American cultural objects from the CC/ FAC collection in relation to similar tourist consumer trinkets; “Devotional Cultures” used objects from the FAC’s Spanish Colonial art collection to explore the ways in which the ideas and practices of Catholicism were disseminated and adapted in the Southwest; and “Extending the Line” included works from the FAC’s Modern and Contemporary collection that looked at different uses of line in visual, literary, and performing arts.

In 2015 the FAC gifted the contents of its comprehensive art publication archives to Tutt Library at Colorado College.