John Lockwood Kipling became the school's first principal who was also appointed as the first curator of the Lahore Museum which opened the same year in an adjacent building. It was named in honor of the recently assassinated British Viceroy Lord Mayo in 1876.
The institute was originally founded in 1876 as Mayo School of Industrial Arts and was one of the two art colleges created by the British crown in British India in reaction to the Arts & Crafts Movement. John Lockwood Kipling, first principal of the college with his son Rudyard Kipling.
