Why People Choose San Francisco Art Institute to Finish 4 Years

Autumn 2021 Upshot

The San Francisco Fine art Institute: Its History and Hereafter

Constance Lewallen marks the 150th anniversary of the San Francisco Art Found, exploring the schoolhouse'due south evolution and pioneering faculty, as well every bit current challenges and the innovations necessary for its preservation.

Diego Rivera, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931, installation view, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Artwork © Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City/Artists Rights Club (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy SFAI

Constance Lewallen is adjunct curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Annal, where she was first matrix curator, subsequently senior curator, and organized many major exhibitions. Photo: Nathaniel Dorsky

It's a cruel irony that simply equally the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) is jubilant its 150th anniversary, information technology is struggling to survive. Alas, it is not an isolated instance: many institutions of higher learning, especially art schools, with fewer than a k students have been under financial strain for a number of years. According to Deborah Obalil, president and executive director of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), most have needed to change their operating construction in ane style or some other. Some stopped granting degrees (Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Quondam Lyme, Connecticut, in 2019); some accept merged with colleges and universities (Schoolhouse of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Tufts University, in 2016); some, such equally the Memphis College of Fine art, accept closed altogether (2020).^ane

Before we get into the specifics of what led to SFAI's electric current crisis and what is beingness done to overcome it, we should know something of its remarkable history. The schoolhouse's roster of teachers and students, to say zilch of the guest lectures, conferences, and exhibitions that take taken place there over the years, speaks to why it has occupied such a critical role in the cultural life of the region.

The oldest art school in the West was born in 1871 in the living room of a local painter, J. B. Wandesforde, who convened a grouping of artists and writers to discuss the establishment of a society to promote the arts. Until its recent travails, the school was a center of artistic activeness in the Bay Area. In its early days, as the California Schoolhouse of Fine Arts, it was located on Nob Hill; in 1926 information technology moved to Chestnut Street, on Russian Hill, to a campus with sweeping views of the city and the bay. The blueprint, by architects Bakewell & Brown, was inspired by a typical Italian hillside boondocks, with its tower, piazza, and cathedral (the school's gallery).^two

In 1930, Henri Matisse visited the new campus. "He said he had never seen such magnificent lighting and working weather in Europe," according to an account of his tour.^three Not long after, Diego Rivera created his awe-inspiring fresco The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a Urban center (1931) in the schoolhouse's educatee gallery, where information technology remains. The fresco portrays the cosmos of both a city and a mural and depicts several of the people who commissioned the work, also as the artists, engineers, architects, and sculptors involved, but, as e'er, Rivera celebrates the common laborer, here epitomized by the outsize figure in the eye. Rivera himself, paint brush and palette in hand, is shown from the rear, sitting on a beam as he supervises the project.

Henri Matisse at SFAI, with Spencer Macky, dean (left), and Lee Randolph, director (right), 1930. Photo: courtesy SFAI

Rivera created three murals in San Francisco, all intact and available to the public. The SFAI landscape is considered the standout, a prime instance of his mastery of the medium, and has made the school an international destination for the study of his work. In 2019, Patti Smith performed in forepart of it; a passionate admirer of the Mexican artists of his generation, especially Rivera himself and Frida Kahlo, and of the revolutionary spirit of their country, she wrote of the event, "Information technology was a moving experience, to sing so shut to his work. The celebrated SFAI is a jewel, a work centric temper of communal process and artistic evolution."⁴

Since the centre of the twentieth century the schoolhouse has been at or near the heart of each new national and regional artistic move. After the stop of Globe War Two, its enrollment surged in role due to an influx of older artists taking advantage of the GI Bill. In his role as president of the school, legendary educator and curator Douglas MacAgy hired Elmer Bischoff, Dorr Bothwell, former educatee Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, David Park, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Withal, and invited New York artists Ad Reinhardt and Marking Rothko to teach summer sessions, making the school a center for Abstruse Expressionism. Although Even so was only at the school from 1946 to 1950, he was especially influential, espousing a romantic, intensely anticommercial view of the role of the artist that, as we shall come across, persisted across departments long after he departed.

Mark Rothko pedagogy at SFAI, 1949. Photo: William Heick, courtesy SFAI

The Painting Department connected to exist the engine of the school. Major figures of the Bay Expanse Figurative movement Theophilus Brown and Paul Wonner, in addition to the same Bischoff, Diebenkorn, and Park, taught there for a time, and many students would go prominent artists, amidst them Dara Birnbaum, Don Ed Hardy (responsible for elevating tattoo to a fine art), Mike Henderson, Paul McCarthy, and Jason Rhoades. Kehinde Wiley, whom Barack Obama chose to paint his official presidential portrait in 2018, has said of his time at that place, "SFAI is where I honed in on my skills and identity as an artist, and I've carried that experience with me throughout my career."^five

In the 1950s, information technology was the Beat era. Allen Ginsberg famously gave his start reading of Howl in 1955 at the Half-dozen Gallery, which was run past artists of the school. Jay DeFeo taught at SFAI even as her magnum opus The Rose (1958–66; now in the collection of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art) slowly deteriorated for years backside a temporary wall in the school's conference room (it was conserved in that aforementioned location in 1995). DeFeo and fellow teachers Joan Dark-brown, Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Kenneth Rexroth were key figures in the artistic and literary customs that gave ascension to the San Francisco Renaissance, a blossoming of undercover art that transformed the city into a center of the advanced. Conner would later suggest an undergraduate seminar described in the grade catalogue as "Wasted Time: unproductive activity of no practical application."⁶

Poster for "The Films of Bruce Conner," SFAI, c. 1983, designed by Sharon Chickanzeff and Marcia Smith. Photo: courtesy SFAI

Bill Berkson in front of Jay DeFeo's painting The Rose (1958–66), 1995. Artwork © The Jay DeFeo Foundation/Artists Rights Club (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy SFAI

A decade after, Peter Selz included SFAI alumni Roy De Forest, Peter Saul, and William T. Wiley in his 1967 exhibition Funk, at the University Art Museum, Berkeley, which gave a name to this regional movement characterized by the personal, the antiformal, the irreverent, and, often, the crude. By that time SFAI was fully immersed in the counterculture, from anti–Vietnam War protests to the Black Liberation Motility. The gallery showed psychedelic rock posters in November 1966, Lord's day Ra performed in the courtyard in December 1968 and again in April 1969, and mind-expanding drugs were prevalent among faculty members and students. In that spirit, in 1966, several SFAI photography students organized The Experience, an exhibition of "hallucinatory photography among v people over a twelve-hr period" in which the artists took hallucinogenic drugs and collectively documented the experience.⁷ Annie Leibovitz began photographing for Rolling Stone in 1968 while still a educatee (she became the magazine's chief photographer in 1973).^eight SFAI faculty fellow member James Robertson designed Artforum magazine, its square format mimicking that of the school's catalogue; and alumni photographers Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones documented Black Panther rallies, Haight Street hippies, and Sausalito's off-the-grid houseboat community. Angela Davis joined the faculty 5 or then years after being on the FBI's Most Wanted list.

Pirkle Jones, Blackness Panthers and crowd, Free Huey Rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, CA, from A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers, 1968 © The Regents of the University of California; courtesy Special Collections, Academy Library, Academy of California, Santa Cruz, Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones Photographs

Angela Davis teaching at SFAI, c. 1978. Photograph: Julie McManus, courtesy SFAI

The school responded to the emergence of experimental functioning, video, and Conceptual forms in the 1970s by establishing the Operation/Video Section (later renamed "New Genres"). The principal members of the area's nascent Conceptual scene populated the section: Howard Fried was the showtime chair, followed past Paul Kos (a onetime painting student at the schoolhouse) and, shortly subsequently, Sharon Grace and Doug Hall. Somewhen, old student Tony Labat joined the faculty, along with Kathy Acker. Invitee instructors and visiting artists over the years accept included Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Chris Burden, Terry Fox, the Kipper Kids, Shigeko Kubota, Gerhard Lischka, Mary Lucier, Linda Montano, Nam June Paik, David Ross, and Bonnie Sherk. Karen Finley was i of the department's first students, and Nao Bustamante, Kota Ezawa, and David Ireland are among its many other notable graduates. The atmosphere was nonhierarchical, irreverent, open to all forms of expression. Kos described it as "big-headed and pompous. And humble and unassuming . . . brusque, brazen, and alive, welcoming and scary."⁹ Former student Carol Szymanski remembers, "Ours was a small, close-knit department, with no interaction with the other departments. I felt as though I was experiencing something very important about what fine art and life were and could be. Cypher was saddled with convention or history. It was all most the act of creating and discussing."^x

Kathy Acker reading from In Memoriam to Identity, SFAI, 1990. Photo: Sven Wiederholt, courtesy SFAI

Barry McGee, Alicia McCarthy, Cerise Neri, and Rigo 23, all SFAI graduates, were the core artists of San Francisco'southward Mission School, which flourished during the 1990s and 2000s and grew from the region's vibrant landscape and graffiti street art. McGee summed upwards his experience as a student: "I think about all the weird kids and teachers, how we all came together in SF at 800 Chestnut. It's one of the strongest art communities I have been involved with. SFAI is steeped in SF fine art history . . . the real deal. Its location and relaxed campus make it i of the last great art schools in America."^xi

From the beginning, film and photography have been central to the schoolhouse's curriculum. For starters, the first public showing of a motion picture occurred in that location in 1880 with Eadweard Muybridge's presentation of his Zoopraxiscope. In 1945, Ansel Adams founded the country'southward outset department of art photography at SFAI, and hired leading photographers of the 24-hour interval including Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Lisette Model, Edward Weston, and Minor White. Other notable kinesthesia followed: Jones, Ellen Brooks, Jerry Burchard, Linda Connor, John Collier, Reagan Louie, Larry Sultan, Henry Wessel, and electric current chair Lindsey White. Amid those who studied in the department are Jim Goldberg, Sharon Lockhart, Mike Mandel, and Catherine Opie. While technique was taught in the foundation classes, the stress was ever on innovation and experimentation. Leibovitz discovered her truthful talent was for photography in the section, although she was a painting major. (She also took a sculpture class taught by Bruce Nauman.) According to Leibovitz (and the same sentiment was expressed by several other former students), "A lot of schools teach you technique. At the [San Francisco Art Found], they teach you how to encounter."¹² Former pupil Jane Reed recalls, "We were a very shut-knit grouping of people defended to making art for the creative impulse non the commercial return."¹³

California Schoolhouse of Fine Arts (now SFAI) catalogue cover, 1940–41, featuring a photograph of the campus by Ansel Adams. Image: courtesy SFAI, reproduced with permission from The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

SFAI'south Moving picture Section, established in 1969, became a home to the country's burgeoning avant-garde filmmaking scene. (Well earlier that, beginning in 1947, the showtime noncommercial film classes anywhere were taught at the school by Sidney Peterson. Stan Brakhage studied at the schoolhouse in the early 1950s.) Robert Nelson, the first filmmaker hired when the Film Section was established, set the tone, stressing self-expression and experimentation. Eventually the faculty included filmmakers James Broughton, Ernie Gehr, Lawrence Hashemite kingdom of jordan, George Kuchar, and Gunvor Nelson, likewise equally famed film curator Edith Kramer. The department also established a residency plan that attracted Chantal Akerman, Hollis Frampton, Carolee Schneemann, and others. Steve Anker, director of the San Francisco Cinematheque and, later, dean at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles, besides equally a faculty member at SFAI, organized regular screenings in the auditorium. Even when video was attracting students in the 1980s and '90s, Anker would write, "Most students were even so excited past the sensuality of celluloid."¹⁴

The section continues its commitment to advanced picture show while also teaching narrative and documentary approaches. Graduates include the Taiwanese installation artist Su-Chen Hung; Ruby Yang, who in 2007 received the Short Motion-picture show Documentary University Award for The Blood of Yingzhou District, about HIV in China; Lance Acord, cinematographer on Sofia Coppola'south award-winning Lost in Translation (2003); and Kathryn Bigelow (a painting major who also studied film), whose flick The Hurt Locker (2008) made her the first woman to win a Best Manager Academy Award. In accepting the honorary doctorate bestowed on her past the school in 2013, Bigelow said that "art education really is vital and unique."¹⁵ Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who studied experimental filmmaking at SFAI, won the Academy Laurels for all-time documentary feature for Citizenfour (2014), and Peter Pau, who studied photography with Jones and filmmaking with Kuchar at the school in the 1980s, won an University Honour for Cinematography for Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000).

Sargent Johnson in his studio, Berkeley, California, c. 1930. Photo: Alpha Stock/Alamy Stock Photo

Sculpture, also, is vital to the plan. Sargent Johnson, a pillar of the Harlem Renaissance, graduated from the school in 1923. In after decades, some of the surface area's leading ceramic artists—Jim Melchert, Ron Nagle, Manuel Neri, and Richard Shaw—taught there total- or part-fourth dimension, and Nauman was a part-time teacher in the department in the late 1960s. Stephanie Syjuco wrote of her feel as a student in the department,

SFAI has always been super experimental—many students were pushing the envelope in terms of performance, new genres, and conceptual works. . . . the plan at SFAI created feral artists. . . . SFAI didn't seem to care most training students toward fifty-fifty thinking about [the art market] at all. . . . The legacy of SFAI is huge and I will always remain thankful that I went in that location. SFAI felt a bit out of time and identify, adhering to the primacy of a fine-arts degree over the decades while other schools added architecture and blueprint programs to eternalize their educatee numbers and financial back up. But I exercise capeesh the purely fine arts focus it had, despite its potentially unmarketable reality. This defiance feels very much like the spirit of SFAI.¹⁶

John Muzzle speaking at SFAI, 1991. Photo: courtesy SFAI

The Humanities Department's outstanding teachers attracted students throughout the school. Poet and art critic Bill Berkson taught art history and poetry classes. Ane of his students was vocalist/songwriter and visual artist Devendra Banhart, who says, "I am certain that without Bill Berkson'due south guidance and encouragement I would 100% not take a career, no uncertainty almost it."¹⁷ Other faculty included Davis (aesthetics), composer Charles Boone (music), and Bernard Mayes, the openly gay ordained priest and radio broadcaster who, in 1961, having learned of San Francisco's high suicide rate, singlehandedly created the nation'due south first suicide hotline.

Given the sheer breadth and ambition of the lectures and public programs that SFAI has hosted, the question is less who has spoken at the school than who hasn't. For over xx years, Berkson ran a speaker program that included not just artists of all stripes, from Robert Rauschenberg to David Hammons, but also prominent fine art critics and curators such as Arthur Danto, Lucy Lippard, and Walter Hopps, internationally recognized poets (John Ashbery), and cultural figures from Emory Douglas of the Black Panthers to John Cage and Rem Koolhaas. As for conferences, in 1949 MacAgy hosted the landmark "Western Roundtable on Modern Art."¹⁸ The object was simply to examine the art of that moment. To proper noun only a few of the participants: cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson (who also taught at the schoolhouse), the artists Marcel Duchamp and Mark Tobey, the critic and art historian Robert Goldwater, the composers Darius Milhaud and Arnold Schoenberg, and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose contempt to the advanced was on full brandish. Seventeen years later the school sponsored another conference, "The Current Moment in Art," to assess the art of that era. It featured Hopps, Selz, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Rivers, Frank Stella, Wayne Thiebaud, and others.¹⁹ Between 1989 and 1991, erstwhile student and painting faculty member Carlos Villa organized a series of symposia, part of his "Worlds in Standoff" projection.

"Western Roundtable on Modern Art," SFAI, 1949. Photo: William Heick, courtesy SFAI

Poster for the Leap 1985 lecture serial at SFAI, designed by Peter Belsito. Photo: courtesy SFAI

I would be remiss if I didn't recognize the importance of the school's gallery, which over the years and under its various directors has mounted many provocative shows.²⁰ Among them: The Hot Rod Aesthetic (1968); American Primitive and Naive Art (1970);²¹ 18' half dozen" × six' 9" × 11' 2 1/2" × 47' 11 3/16" × 29' 8 1/ii" × 31' ix 3/16" (1969), which brought the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Edward Kienholz, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner to SFAI and was an early case of institutional support for the Conceptual motion; and Other Sources: An American Essay (1976), a pioneering exhibition and performance series, organized by Villa, that celebrated cultural multifariousness and a more inclusive art earth by showcasing the work and cultural traditions of artists of color. Some other groundbreaking exhibition, Touch: Relational Fine art from the 1990s to Now (2002), cocurated by Karen Moss and Nicolas Bourriaud, featured an international roster of artists associated with Bourriaud's concept of "relational aesthetics," the first exhibition in the United States to fully explore the phenomenon of social interaction that Bourriaud had identified.

Despite its stellar history, the school reached a crisis point in March 2020. What went wrong? SFAI has had financial difficulties off and on for years but always rose phoenixlike from the proverbial ashes. There is non only one cause of the electric current dire circumstance; equally noted earlier, SFAI is one amid many art schools that are in jeopardy. Historically, near started as community-based art centers. In one case they shifted to the category of degree-granting colleges, they were required to increase authoritative staff to satisfy nonprofit guidelines and federal regulations, such every bit Title 9. AICAD's Obalil observes that such costs never level off; they e'er increase.²² Virtually art schools lack an ample endowment and traditionally take not attracted major philanthropy. Consequently, they rely on tuition. That leaves 2 options: raise tuition, which is usually quite steep (SFAI's, which is fairly typical, is effectually $45,000), or increase the size of the student body. In the instance of SFAI, neither i, nor even both, can meet the yearly operating upkeep of approximately $xviii meg.

In fact, enrollment in SFAI has fallen off in recent years from its peak of effectually 1,000 in the tardily 1960s and early '70s to 300 or and so in contempo years. This was due in part to rising tuition costs and in office to a subtract in the number of foreign students, who traditionally have fabricated upwardly a practiced portion of the student body and who pay total tuition. Nigh other students take out substantial loans to finance their education, a deterrent when a fine-art degree doesn't conspicuously atomic number 82 to a financially secure career. In this style, SFAI'due south dedication to a purely fine-arts education has fabricated it difficult to attract students in today's economy. Those art schools that also offering blueprint and other practical arts, such as the California College of the Arts (CCA), based in San Francisco, have fared amend.

Plein air life cartoon class, SFAI, c. 1958. Photo: courtesy SFAI

Then at that place was the decision to develop a second campus. In 2015, the schoolhouse secured a sixty-year lease on one of the piers at nearby Fort Mason, a one-time military site administered past the National Park Service and now habitation to nonprofit arts-oriented venues. The school struck an bonny bargain whereby Fort Mason offered a very favorable lease. In return the school was responsible for a much-needed, costly renovation. It seemed like a good thought at a time when enrollment was still relatively good for you and the school had outgrown the rented, rather dismal graduate studios and classrooms in the Dogpatch neighborhood across town. Notwithstanding, just every bit the new campus opened in 2017, enrollment began to turn down (the schoolhouse had lacked a managing director of admissions for over a year). Moreover, the fundraising goal for the build-out was non met—SFAI'southward alumni base had been somewhat mystifyingly neglected—raising the debt to $19 million.²³ This resulted in a banking concern loan, the collateral for which was the Russian Hill property and all other avails of the school. The yearly interest was crushing.

By March 2020, it looked as if the schoolhouse might not brand information technology this time. The coup de grâce was that, just equally negotiations to merge with the University of San Francisco, a local private Jesuit university, were all but finalized, the deal fell victim to the covi d-nineteen pandemic and other contributing factors. Once the merger collapsed, then-SFAI-president Gordon Knox and board chair Pam Rorke Levy announced that the school would non enroll new students in fall 2021 and laid off adjunct faculty and all but a skeleton staff. That so alarmed the customs that in that location was a significant uptick in fundraising, which, along with the receipt of a 2d circular of funds from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, averted the schoolhouse'south closure. But what really saved the day was that the board was able to renegotiate the depository financial institution loan past reaching an understanding with the University of California, which assumed the loan and allowed SFAI vi years to repay the debt, including a year of relief. The school was as well able to secure permission from Fort Mason to sublet the new campus and found a brusk-term tenant, with others expressing interest in renting function or all of the space in the future—a viable system as long every bit the tenant fits Fort Bricklayer'south guidelines that it be a nonprofit.

Flyer for a Dominicus Ra concert at SFAI, 1968. Photo: courtesy SFAI

In July 2020, the board created the Reimagine Committee, made upward of SFAI faculty, alumni, staff, and artists unaffiliated with the school, along with local cultural leaders and external consultants. This body was charged with addressing the schoolhouse'due south problems and coming up with ideas on how to make it healthier economically and more relevant to today's world. The committee identified many of the school's weaknesses—a lack of transparency in its controlling, for example—and proposed, among other ideas, decentralizing the current organizing structure in favor of collective leadership (a bottom-up rather than a top-downwards approach). Unfortunately, an adversarial relationship betwixt the board and the committee ensued when the committee, which felt its findings weren't sufficiently appreciated, appear that it wouldn't nowadays them to the board until and then-chair Levy stepped downwardly. Levy and other stalwarts had stayed on through the worst of the crisis and had fought to enable the schoolhouse to stay open and to retain its tenured faculty.

The school was the subject area of a great deal of negative press when it was leaked that negotiations were underway to monetize the Rivera mural. According to Levy and other trustees, information technology was the board's fiduciary responsibility to investigate all avenues to shore upward the school's finances in the short term, including by selling the mural, while exploring longer-term solutions. The fresco was appraised at approximately $50 1000000, and it was hoped that a partner would endow information technology in place.²⁴ To that end, trustee and builder John Marx came up with a brilliant program that would allow the fresco to remain in its present location past opening the gallery to the public (the gallery has an exterior wall facing the fresco). It could and so become a pocket museum, classroom, and centre for the study of fresco, conservation, Rivera, and the Mexican mural movement.

Rendering of a proposal to add together a new entrance to SFAI's Diego Rivera Gallery, Dec 2020. Prototype: Form4 Architecture/Teapot

One-time faculty artist Mildred Howard had drafted a petition signed by dozens of artists (both affiliated and unaffiliated with the school), curators, arts-organization leaders, and gallerists across the state, urging the sale of the fresco only every bit a last resort. Unfortunately, the press focused on the possibility of removing the mural, which was not the board's preferred option; in fact it was vehemently opposed. For one thing, while the removal of the fresco from the wall is technically possible (although not without endangering it), on a symbolic level information technology would exist tantamount to vehement the soul out of the school. This is a moot betoken now, since the fresco is upward for landmark status, which, if achieved equally expected, would decrease its value. (The Chestnut Street campus is itself landmarked.) The mural could still generate funds, notwithstanding, if another donor is identified who would endow it in place, or past making it the focus of a public infinite such as Marx conceived, or, ideally, both.

The new board chair, the photographer, educator, and alumnus Lonnie Graham, is exploring ways to continue the school adrift for three years (he calls it a "runway") while preparing for a long-term solution. To that end, he and the other trustees, now numbering seven (all but three had resigned during the Rivera controversy), have embarked on a series of listening tours with faculty, staff, alumni, and electric current students (who seem especially energized by being included) in lodge not but to hear their points of view only also to establish much-needed trust among these groups. If all goes well, the plan is to be able to rehire those adjunct teachers and staff who were laid off. The school has remained open (a handful of students will graduate this spring) and is expecting to enroll approximately 50 students for autumn 2021, 100 the following year, and 300 the twelvemonth subsequently that, numbers that should allow time to develop a sustainable operating structure.

There are plans for a 150th-anniversary exhibition and do good sale at the schoolhouse in November of 2021. Titled Looking Forward, information technology volition include a big pick of works past artists, both local and national, donated by the artists themselves, also as by alumni, friends, collectors, foundations, electric current and former trustees, and prominent galleries. The post-obit is a partial list of the artists to be represented: Cunningham, Diebenkorn, Ireland, Kienholz, Opie, Diane Arbus, Michael Heizer, Hans Hofmann, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Hung Liu, Julie Mehretu, Gary Simmons, and William T. Wiley. In addition, major works by Hall, Rivers, and Thiebaud are being offered for sale before the exhibition.

The long-term solution would most probable be a partnership with a college or university, or perhaps an alliance of art schools with complementary strengths. No one believes that returning to the mode the schoolhouse has operated in the past could or should exist the goal.

SFAI alumnus Kehinde Wiley unveiling his portrait of former President Barack Obama, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, 2018. Photo: Marking Wilson/Getty Images

It must be noted that 1 contributor to the school's troubles has been a lack of consistent leadership: betwixt 1987 and 2021 there were 6 presidents or interim presidents. Currently, SFAI has no president just rather a chief academic officer and an interim chief operational officer. Peradventure it'due south unnecessary to have a unmarried president; instead, several officers could share responsibility for the governance of the school according to their expertise. Meanwhile, the covid-19 pandemic has shown that there are educational models that exercise non crave on-site presence. Some students might be on campus, others could learn from afar. The same goes for faculty, invitee teachers, and speakers. San Francisco, after all, is situated in the middle of the tech world and should be in an advantageous position to devise new models.

Where practise things stand now? The school'due south debt has been deferred and recruitment and marketing officers accept been retained. While working to increase enrollment, the board is besides seeking a guarantor for a $vii million bridge loan. Several new, promising trustees have joined the board and there has been some impressive success in fundraising. The Access 50 Scholarship Fund, established under Knox'due south presidency and directed at people of color, has received donations from creative person Sam Gilliam and from Julie Wainwright, founder and CEO of RealReal, an online assignment market for luxury goods, who transferred a substantial amount of stock. The fund is currently valued at $750,000, and the commencement scholarships volition be awarded in the autumn of 2021. Expected income from leasing the Fort Mason campus might well yield $1 million a twelvemonth over the fifty-five-yr duration of the lease, which the school tin can infringe against. Over time, the new leadership is committed to implementing many of the Reimagine Committee's suggestions, not least of which is finding new, more equitable and sustainable models that volition enable information technology to lower tuition.

It seems that the school has been able to retreat from the completeness.

Brindled throughout this text are quotations from one-time students almost their love for the school. Why does it inspire such passion? According to what they take said over and over, it is considering of SFAI'southward unique commitment to a purely fine-arts pedagogy that teaches students not only to be artists but, just as important, to remember and see, to innovate and experiment. The school isn't for everyone. Some erstwhile students cite the prohibitive cost and the lack of sufficient facilities, but most have positive, even rapturous memories of their time there. Many appreciate that they were treated as artists from mean solar day one; others cite the cultural and artistic variety of the educatee body, and withal others the support of the kinesthesia.²⁵ Dara Birnbaum wrote but, "I was able to fall in honey with art there."²⁶

I wish to acknowledge the many people who helped me with this article. I couldn't have written the history of the San Francisco Art Institute without the skillful-natured aid of Jeff Gunderson, librarian and archivist at the schoolhouse, and his assistant Rebecca Alexander, whose chronology I drew upon and who helped me place sources and answered what must have seemed endless questions. Steve Anker guided me through the history of the schoolhouse's Film Department and Linda Conner did the same for the Photography Department. I couldn't have navigated the twists and turns of recent events and future plans without the assistance of Deborah Obalil, Lonnie Graham, John Marx, Doug Hall, Jennifer Rissler, Gordon Knox, Jeremy Stone, Lindsey White, Leonie Guyer, and Joyce Burstein. Finally, I am grateful to Judy Bloch, who deftly edited the essay, every bit she has then many of those I take written in the past.

1Deborah Obalil, telephone conversation with the author, March nine, 2021.

2Bakewell & Brown designed many San Francisco landmarks, including City Hall, and Arthur Brown Jr. later designed Coit Tower. A 1969 addition to the campus was designed by Paffard Keatinge-Dirt. The schoolhouse changed its proper noun from California School of Fine Arts to San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 1961; for simplicity, the school is referred to by its current name throughout this commodity.

3San Francisco Fine art Association Message, Apr 1930, p. four. SFAI Athenaeum, Anne Bremer Memorial Library, SFAI.

4Patti Smith, Instagram postal service, thisispattismith, Jan 19, 2019. Available online at https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs1Mcx_hpUx/ (accessed June 7, 2021).

5Kehinde Wiley, quoted in SFAI, "Kehinde Wiley to deliver keynote address at San Francisco Art Institute Commencement and receive honorary degree," March 21, 2018. Available online at https://sfai.edu/uploads/near-sfai/2018_SFAI_Commencement_Release_03212018.pdf (accessed June 7, 2021).

6Gunderson, illustrated chronology, 1954–69, unpublished.

7"The Feel," printing release, SFAI, May 23, 1966. SFAI Archives.

8Annie Leibovitz had been a student in Bruce Nauman's sculpture class.

9Paul Kos, "Studio 10," in San Francisco Art Institute MFA Catalog, 2002 (San Francisco: SFAI, 2002).

10Carol Szymanski, quoted in Taylor Dafoe, "'I Barbarous in Honey With Art There': As the San Francisco Art Institute Closes, 5 Celebrated Artists Reflect on How the School Shaped Them," Artnet News, April one, 2020. Available online at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/san-francisco-fine art-institute-alumni-1820244 (accessed June 10, 2021).

11Barry McGee, quoted in "10 Famous Artists You Didn't Know Went to SFAI," (im)material Blog, SFAI, n.d. Available online at https://sfai.edu/weblog/x-famous-artists-who-went-to-sfai (accessed June 10, 2021).

12Leibovitz, quoted in Cynthia Robins, "Celebrities Wow Fine art Oversupply," San Francisco Examiner, March 18, 1996.

13Jane Reed, email to the writer, April 9, 2021.

14Steve Anker, "Radicalizing Vision: Film and Video in the Schools," in Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid, eds., Radical Low-cal: Culling Flick & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), p. 155. This account was drawn from Anker'southward essay, pp. 152–58.

15Kathryn Bigelow, quoted in "SFAI Alumna Spotlight: Kathryn Bigelow," Art & Education, June 26, 2013. Available online at https://www.artandeducation.net/announcements/108449/sfai-alumna-spotlight-kathryn-bigelow (accessed June 10, 2021).

16Stephanie Syjuco, quoted in Dafoe, "'I Cruel in Beloved With Art There.'"

17Devendra Banhart, email to the writer, Apr 20, 2021.

18A transcript of the briefing is available online at https://www.ubu.com/historical/wrtma/transcript.htm (accessed June ten, 2021).

19The transcript is currently being digitized; see https://sfai.edu/press-releases/sfai-receives-prestigious-grant-to-digitize-recordings-featuring-some-of-the-most-prominent-names-in-20th-century-art-history (accessed June 24, 2021).

20Directors of the exhibition program over the years have included James Monte, Phil Linhares, Helene Fried, David Rubin, Richard Pinnegar, Jeanie Weiffenbach, Karen Moss, Hou Hanru, Andrew McClintock, Hesse McGraw, Katie Morgan, and Kat Trataris.

21Artists represented in American Archaic and Naïve Fine art were W. L. Caldwell, Carlos Carvajal Sr., Jim Colclough, Flipper, B. J. Newton, Harold Pedersen, Jane Porter, Martín Ramírez, Pauline Simon, P. M. Wentworth, and Joseph Yoakum.

22Obalil, telephone conversation with the author.

23A grouping of alumni, noting that fundraising outreach to alumni had virtually and inexplicably fallen off, have formed their ain committee, SF Artists Alumni, to promote a collaborative way frontwards. They maintain and expand outreach to alumni all over the world and publish a newsletter covering alumni activities.

24See Zachary Small, "San Francisco's Top Fine art School Says Futurity Hinges on a Diego Rivera Landscape," New York Times, January 5, 2021.

25See "San Francisco Fine art Constitute Reviews," Niche. Bachelor online at https://www.niche.com/colleges/san-francisco-fine art-constitute/reviews/ (accessed June 10, 2021).

26Dara Birnbaum, quoted in Dafoe, "'I Roughshod in Love With Art At that place.'"

SFAI'south do good auction and sale, Looking Forrad, featuring works by Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Diane Arbus, Hans Hofmann, Hung Liu, Wayne Thiebaud, and William T. Wiley, among others, will take place at SFAI on November 4, 2021; to attend the event, purchase tickets atsfai.edu

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Source: https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2021/10/18/essay-san-francisco-art-institute-its-history-and-future/

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