San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately 220 undergraduates and 112 graduate students were enrolled in 2021. The institution was accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), and was a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD). The school closed permanently in July 2022.
Coit Tower is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California, overlooking the city and San Francisco Bay. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built between 1932 and 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.
Hung Liu (劉虹) was a Chinese-born American contemporary artist. She was predominantly a painter, but also worked with mixed-media and site-specific installation and was also one of the first artists from China to establish a career in the United States.
George Washington High School is a public high school in Richmond District, San Francisco, California. In 2011, Washington High was ranked by Newsweek's Jay Mathews Challenge Index as the 497th best high school in the United States.
Xavier Timoteo Martínez was a California artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was a well-known bohemian figure in San Francisco, the East Bay, and the Monterey Peninsula and one of the co-founders of two California artists' organizations and an art gallery. He painted in a tonalist style and also produced monotypes, etchings, and silverpoint.
Rigo 23 is a Portuguese-born American muralist, painter, and political artist. He is known in the San Francisco community for having painted a number of large, graphic "sign" murals including: One Tree next to the U.S. Route 101 on-ramp at 10th and Bryant Street, Innercity Home on a large public housing structure, Sky/Ground on a tall abandoned building at 3rd and Mission Street, and Extinct over a Shell gas station. He resides in San Francisco, California.
Robert H. Hudson is an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.
Francisco Mora was a Mexican artist of the "Mexican School" of mural painters.
Maxine Albro was an American painter, muralist, lithographer, mosaic artist, and sculptor. She was one of America's leading female artists, and one of the few women commissioned under the New Deal's Federal Art Project, which also employed Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Byron Randall was an American West Coast artist, well known for his expressionist paintings and printmaking. A contemporary of artists Pablo O'Higgins, Anton Refregier, Robert P. McChesney, Emmy Lou Packard, and Pele de Lappe, Randall shared their left wing politics while exploring different techniques and styles, including a vivid use of color and line.
Bernard Baruch Zakheim was a Warsaw-born San Francisco muralist, best known for his work on the Coit Tower murals.
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
Ray Boynton (1883–1951) also known as Raymond Boynton, was an American artist and arts educator, most famous for his mural work in California during the Great Depression where he earned commissions under the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and the Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP).
Carlos Villa was a Filipino-American visual artist, curator and faculty member in the Painting Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work often explored the meaning of cultural diversity and sought to expand awareness of multicultural issues in the arts.
Frederick "Fred" Erskine Olmsted Jr. was an American artist and biophysicist. He created social realism themed murals and sculptures for the Federal Art Project, and the Public Works of Art Project.
Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is currently based in Oakland, California.
Taravat Talepasand is an Iranian-American contemporary artist, activist, and educator. She is known for her interdisciplinary painting practice including drawing, sculpture and installation. As an Iranian-American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority. Her approach to representation and figuration reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our Western Society. Talepasand previously held the title of the chair of the painting department at San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). She is a Tenure-Track professor in Art Practice at Portland State University, College of Art + Design.
Susan Kelk Cervantes is an American artist who has been at the epicenter of the San Francisco mural movement and the co-founder and executive director of the community-based non-profit, Precita Eyes Muralists.
Frank Van Sloun (1879-1938) was an American painter, muralist and etcher. He painted murals in California. His paintings and etchings are in museums in California, Missouri and Washington, D.C..
Life of Washington is a mural cycle in San Francisco's George Washington High School painted by Victor Arnautoff in 1936. It depicts George Washington at various real and imagined points in his life. Composed of 13 panels and spanning 1600 square feet, the work was the largest mural by a single artist that the WPA funded. According to the art critic Roberta Smith, the cycle is "among the most honest and possibly the most subversive of the W.P.A. era".
