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.
Ellen Fullman is an American composer, instrument builder, and performer. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is known for her 70-foot (21-meter) Long String instrument, tuned in just intonation and played with rosin-coated fingers.
Midori (美登里) is a sexologist, educator, author, artist, speaker, and coach. Midori wrote the first English language book with instruction on Japanese rope bondage and continues to write on alternative sexual practices, including BDSM and sexual fetishism, bondage, erotic fiction, and more. She teaches classes, presents at conferences, coaches individuals and professionals, and facilitates in-depth weekend intensives. She is based in San Francisco, California.
Christopher Willits is a San Francisco-based guitarist, electronic music composer and producer, visual artist and scholar. His music is electroacoustic in nature, in that both analogue and digital sounds are meshed into one singular sound.
Erling Wold is a San Francisco-based composer of opera and contemporary classical music. He is best known for his later chamber operas, and his early experiments as a microtonalist.
David Kenneth Ireland was an American sculptor, conceptual artist and Minimalist architect.
Nayland Blake is an American artist whose focus is on interracial attraction, same-sex love, and intolerance of the prejudice toward them. Their mixed-media work has been variously described as disturbing, provocative, elusive, tormented, sinister, hysterical, brutal, and tender.
Robert H. Hudson was an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage of metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.
Truong Tran is a Vietnamese-American poet, visual artist, and teacher. He is an author of five collections of poetry and a children's book. As a visual artist Tran is best known for mixed media pieces though he has worked in multiple mediums. His work is in private collections, and he has been honored with solo shows and an exhibition catalog "I Meant to Say Please Pass the Sugar: Mixed Media Works 2009- Present" (2014).
Doug Hall is an American photographer and media artist, who has received national and international recognition for his work in a range of practices including performance, installation, video, and large scale digital photography. He was a member of T. R. Uthco Collective (1970–1978).
Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. is a Filipina American artist trio active since 1995 and known for their use of humor and camp to explore issues of culture and gender. Founded in San Francisco by artists Eliza Barrios, Reanne Estrada, and Jenifer K. Wofford, the group's full name, Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., conflates a once-common stereotype of Filipina women as "mail order brides" with an acronym suggestive of an organized crime organization. The group has often been referred to in shorthand as "M.O.B.".
J. John Priola is a San Francisco-based contemporary visual artist and educator. He is known for photographic series capturing humble, generally inanimate subjects that explore human presence, absence and loss through visual metaphor. Priola's mature work can be broadly divided into earlier black-and-white, gelatin-silver series—formal elegant, painterly works largely focused on everyday objects and architectural details elevated to portraits—and later color series, which gradually shifted from architectural settings to detailed, varied explorations of the often-conflicted human relationship to nature. San Francisco Chronicle critic Kenneth Baker situated Priola's images "on the border between documentary and conceptual art," where they function as surveys of under-noticed details that "remind us how many potential questions, how much intimate domestic history, may lie embedded on the margins of our attention."
Cassils is a visual and performance artist, body builder, and personal trainer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada now based in Los Angeles, California, United States. Their work uses the body in a sculptural fashion, integrating feminism, body art, and gay male aesthetics. Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a United States Artists Fellowship, a California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship (2012), several Canada Council for the Arts grants, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. Cassils is gender non-conforming, transmasculine, and goes by singular they pronouns.
Jenifer K. Wofford is an American contemporary artist and art educator based in San Francisco, California, United States. Known for her contributions to Filipino-American visual art, Wofford's work often addresses hybridity, authenticity and global culture, frequently from an ironic, humorous perspective. Wofford collaborates with artists Reanne Estrada and Eliza Barrios as the artist group Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. She was also the curator of Galleon Trade, an international art exchange among California, Mexico and the Philippines.
Black Salt Collective is an American queer, women-of-color artist collective that currently consists of four California-based artists and curators: Sarah Biscarra-Dilley, Grace Rosario Perkins, Anna Luisa Petrisko, and Adee Roberson. Founded in 2012, Black Salt Collective's art practice crosses disciplines and media, including performance, video, installation, sound, painting, collage, textiles, sculpture, and printmaking.
Herbert Siguenza is an American actor, writer, visual artist, and performer based in California. He is best known for co-founding the theater performance group Culture Clash, which was founded in 1984 and is still active. He is currently the playwright-in-residence at the San Diego Rep and has continued to pursue many solo ventures in addition to his group work.
Sarah Biscarra-Dilley is a Native American interdisciplinary artist, curator, and writer from the Northern Chumash Tribe. Much of Biscarra-Dilley's work brings focus to sexuality and gender identity, as well as racial and cultural marginalization. These themes can be found throughout all of her work, whether it be in isolation or concurrently. Her works focus on the resiliency, self-determination, and sovereignty of Indigenous populations through the collaboration and shared experiences between communities, specifically within nitspu tiłhin ktitʸu, the State of California.
Abdullah Qureshi is a Queer Muslim Pakistani cis-male artist, social activist, curator, educator, and cultural producer. Qureshi utilizes paint, watercolor, film, and faceless depictions of his male friends to capture his personal histories, trauma, and childhood memories surrounding his identity as a Queer Muslim Pakistani man. Qureshi explores his identity in his work within an Abstract Expressionist style using large canvases.
Hushidar "Hushi" Mortezaie is an Iranian-born American fashion designer, artist, collagist, and graphic designer. He co-founded the fashion label Michael and Hushi. Mortezaie is best known for his over-the-top Persian-aesthetic collaged textiles and fashion designs, often exploring glamour, politics, and kitsch. He has lived and worked in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
David T. Schubert was an American graffiti artist and professional photographer recognized for his photographs of skateboarding and graffiti.
