The AtriumThe roof terrace at SFAI's Chestnut Street Campus offered a scenic view over the city.
The San Francisco Art Institute roots go back to 1871 with the formation of the San Francisco Art Association—a small but influential group of artists, writers, and community leaders, most notably, led by Virgil Macey Williams and first president Juan B. Wandesforde, with B.P. Avery, Edward Bosqui, Thomas Hill, and S.W. Shaw, who came together to promote regional art and artists, and to establish a school and museum to further and preserve what they saw as a new and distinct artistic tradition which had developed in the relative cultural isolation and unique landscape of the American West.
By 1874, the SFAA had 700 regular members and 100 life members and had raised sufficient funds and the necessary momentum to launch an art school, which was named the California School of Design (CSD). Painter Virgil Macy Williams, who had spent nearly ten years studying with master painters in Italy and had taught at Harvard College before coming to San Francisco,[3] became the school's first director and painting instructor—positions he held until his sudden death in 1886.[4] During Williams' tenure, the CSD developed a national reputation and amassed a significant collection of early California and western fine art as the foundation collected for a planned museum.
In 1893, Edward Searles donated the Hopkins Mansion, one of the most palatial and elaborate Victorian mansions ever built, to the University of California in trust for the SFAA for "instruction in and illustration of the fine arts, music and literature."[5] Named the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, it housed both the CSD's campus and SFAA's art collection. Through this new affiliation, students of the University of California were able to enroll in classes at the CSD.
20th century
In 1906, the devastating fire following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art building, and the CSD and SFAA facilities, records and art collection. At the time, the replacement value of the building and its contents was estimated at $2.573 million. However, the combined amount of numerous insurance policies yielded less than $100,000 for rebuilding. Nevertheless, within a year, the SFAA built a new but comparatively modest campus in the same location,[6] and adopted the name San Francisco Institute of Art.[7]
In 1916, the SFAA merged with the San Francisco Society of Artists and assumed directorship of the San Francisco Museum of Art at the Palace of Fine Arts, which was established to host the 1915 World's Fair, Panama–Pacific International Exposition. In addition, the school was renamed the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) to better reflect its mission to promote, develop and preserve regional art and culture. In 1926 the school moved to 800 Chestnut Street, which remained the school's main campus. In 1930 Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was hired to paint The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, which is located in the student-directed art gallery.
During its first 60 years, influential artists associated with the school included Eadweard Muybridge, photographer and pioneer of motion graphics; Maynard Dixon, painter of San Francisco's labor movement and of the landscape of the West; Henry Kiyama, whose Four Immigrants Manga was the first graphic novel published in the U.S.; Sargent Claude Johnson, one of the first African-American artists from California to achieve a national reputation; Louise Dahl-Wolfe, an innovative photographer whose work for Harper's Bazaar in the 1930s defined a new American style of "environmental" fashion photography; Gutzon Borglum, the creator of the large-scale public sculpture known as Mount Rushmore; Rudolf Hess, German Expressionist painter and art critic, Emily Carr, Modernist Canadian painter well known for her work with indigenous culture,[8] and numerous others.
By the early 1950s, San Francisco's North Beach had become the West Coast center of the Beat Movement, and music, poetry, and discourse were an intrinsic part of artists' lives. Collage artist Jess Collins renounced a career as a plutonium developer and enrolled at SFAI as a painting student. In 1953 he and his partner, poet Robert Duncan, along with painter Harry Jacobus, started the King Ubu Gallery, an important alternative space for art, poetry, and music.
Renamed San Francisco Art Institute in 1961, SFAI rejected the distinction between fine and applied arts. SFAI stood at the forefront of recognizing an expanded vocabulary of art-making that hybridized many practices including performance, conceptual art, new media, graphic arts, typography, and political and social documentary.
In 1969, a new addition to the building by Paffard Keatinge-Clay added 22,500sqft (2,090m2) of studio space, a large theater/lecture hall, an outdoor amphitheater, galleries, and a cafe.[11]
Installation art, video, music, and social activism continued to inform much of the work of faculty and students in the 1970s and 1980s. The faculty during this period included George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Angela Davis, Kathy Acker, Robert Colescott, and many other influential artists and writers. Among the students were a number of performance artists and musicians, including Karen Finley, whose performances challenged notions of femininity and political power, and Prairie Prince and Michael Cotten, who presented their first performance as the Tubes in the SFAI lecture hall, and became pioneers in the field of music video. The school became a hub for the Punk music scene, with bands such as the Mutants, the Avengers, and Romeo Void all started by SFAI students. Technology also became part of art practice: faculty Sharon Grace's Send/Receive project used satellite communications to create an interactive transcontinental performance, while Survival Research Laboratories, founded by student Mark Pauline, began staging large-scale outdoor performances of ritualized interactions among machines, robots, and pyrotechnics.
Since the 1990s the studio and classroom have become increasingly connected to the world via public art and community actions. As students at SFAI, Barry McGee, Aaron Noble, and Rigo 23, among others, were part of the movement known as the Mission School, taking their graffiti-inspired art to the streets and walls of the city. Faculty and students have created site-specific projects in locations from the San Francisco waterfront (Ann Chamberlain and Walter Hood's monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade) to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana, Mexico (a sculpture by artist Pedro Reyes and SFAI students for the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies program). Organizations like Artists' Television Access (ATA) and Root Division, founded by alumni, and SFAI's City Studio program engage and educate local communities and cultivate a vital artistic ecosystem.[12]
Due to financial mismanagement, declining enrollment, high real estate costs, and a reliance on income from campus property rentals, which was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic,[14] the school announced on March 23, 2020, that it would stop accepting new students for the following fall semester.[15] The institute marked its 149th birthday on Thursday, March 26, 2020, shortly after failed merger talks.[16]
They briefly announced the cancelation of the fall 2020 semester[17] before reversing their decision and allowing for online and offline classes through the 2020–21 school year.[18] In July 2020, after securing $4million in donations, the board and administration announced an agreement had been reached to retain all tenured faculty for the coming academic year, resulting in the continuation of courses for the following academic year and the reinstatement of the degree program for those within a year of graduation.[19]
In February 2022 the University of San Francisco and SFAI announced that they were studying an acquisition of SFAI by USF;[20] however USF backed out of the deal in July. SFAI ceased its degree programs but announced it would remain as "a nonprofit organization to protect its name, archives, and legacy".[21] On July 16, 2022, the school closed permanently.[22]
On April 26, 2023, the San Francisco Art Institute filed for Chapter 7 liquidation.[23] The campus was put up for sale in late June, with an announcement that Diego Rivera's mural in the Diego Rivera Gallery, The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, with an assessed value of $50million, would be sold as part of the property unless no satisfactory offer is received, in which case it might be available for separate sale.[24]
In late February 2024, a nonprofit corporation endowed by Laurene Powell Jobs bought the campus including the mural for approximately $30million, with the stated intention of continuing its use as an arts institution, plus possible on-campus housing for artists in residence.[25]
Founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, the Photography Department became the first program of its kind dedicated to exploring photography as a fine-art medium.[citation needed] Adams designed the school's darkrooms and attracted photographers for the original faculty, including Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Minor White, and Morley Baer, who became Head of the Department after White's departure in 1953.
Howard Fried founded the performance and video department (which later became New Genres) at the San Francisco Art Institute. In the late 1970s, a long-lost collection of Eadweard Muybridge photographs was found and an auction of the materials financed the creation of the department — and the purchase of two Portopak cameras. (More than a century before, the English artist had presented the first ever public showing of moving pictures on campus and apparently left something behind.)
In summer 2010, SFAI moved its housing program to two locations in Nob Hill: Sutter Hall at 717 Sutter Street, and Abby Hall at 630 Geary Street. In spring 2020, the housing program was dissolved due to financial exigency.
Exhibitions and public programs
Students were given direct access to exhibitions, lectures, symposia, films, and other unique interdisciplinary events. An integral part of campus life, such events connected students to the larger community of artists, art, and contemporary ideas. The Walter and McBean Galleries (on the 800 Chestnut Street campus) house exhibitions, workshops, and other alternative and experimental avenues for presenting work by international contemporary artists. Students also had the opportunity to display their work in a number of spots on SFAI's two campuses, including the Diego Rivera Gallery.[27]
Adaline Kent Award
Former board member (1947–1957), Adaline Kent was a sculptor and alumni of the school. Upon her death in 1957, she bequeathed $10,000 for the establishment of an annual award for a promising California Artist.[28] Each year since 1957 the prize was awarded by the San Francisco Art Institute Artists' Committee. Winners included Ron Nagle (1978),[29]Wally Hedrick (1985),[30]Mildred Howard (1991), Clare Rojas (2004),[31] and as the final award, Scott Williams[32] (2005).
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim. Art critic Michael Kimmelman described Diebenkorn as "one of the premier American painters of the postwar era, whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces of California, where he spent virtually his entire life."
David Park was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Wally Bill Hedrick was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
Robert H. Hudson is an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage of metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.
The San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) was an organization that promoted California artists, held art exhibitions, published a periodical, and established the first art school west of Chicago. The SFAA – which, by 1961, completed a long sequence of mission shifts and re-namings to become the San Francisco Art Institute – was the predecessor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Over its lifetime, the association helped establish a Northern California regional flavor of California Tonalism as differentiated from Southern California American Impressionism.
The Diego Rivera Gallery is building, formerly a student-directed art gallery and exhibition space for work by San Francisco Art Institute students.
The Walter and McBean Galleries were located at in Russian Hill, as part of the former San Francisco Art Institute's Chestnut campus. It has presented an influential program of exhibitions highlighting innovative work by emerging artists and experimental work by more established artists, from throughout the United States and abroad.
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 earning 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" 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.
Charles Stafford Duncan (1892–1952) was a San Francisco painter and lithographer perhaps best known for his mural in the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California. He won the Benjamin Altman Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1937.
Taravat Talepasand is an American contemporary artist, activist, and educator, of Iranian descent. 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 an assistant professor in art practice at Portland State University.
James Budd Dixon was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker. He was a member of the "Sausalito Six" group of San Francisco Bay Area painters.
Fred Thomas Martin was an American artist, writer and arts administrator and educator who was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since the late 1940s. He was a driving force of the Bay Area art scene from the mid 1950s until his retirement from the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to his artistic practice, Martin was widely known for his work as a longtime administrator and Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).
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.
Rudolf Hess was an American fine art painter, sculptor and art critic, based in Northern California. His work is of the German Expressionist school and the subject matter covers many genres including landscapes and nature, portraits and everyday city life.
Eleanor "Nell" Walter Sinton was an American artist, an art community leader, and educator. She was a distinguished San Francisco Bay Area abstract painter and collagist. Sinton served on the San Francisco Arts Commission, and she was one of the Board of Trustees of the San Francisco Art Institute.
Hayward Ellis King (1928–1990) was an American painter, collagist, art dealer, and an arts administrator. He was a mid-20th century arts leader in San Francisco, California, a co-founder of Six Gallery, and served as the director of the Richmond Art Center. He was the first Black artist to serve as both director and curator of a major San Francisco Bay Area art gallery.
Jeremy Radcliffe Anderson, was an American artist and educator, known for his wood sculptures. He was an influential mid-century fine art figure in San Francisco, California; and taught classes at San Francisco Art Institute.
↑ Dobbin, Hamilton Henry. "California Art Institute, California Street 1908. [graphic]". csl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. Retrieved July 19, 2023. Caption written on photo: "Cal Art Institute, California Street, 1908." Text written underneath: "Building "California Art Institute." Present site of Mark Hopkins Hotel. Looking from Pine and Mason Street. Photo 1908." Photo shows the south side of the Art Institute, a two-story building with bulging bay windows and flying the American flag. The sloping hillside below the building shows the terracing and landscaping done when the old Mark Hopkins mansion occupied the site. This includes the rather Medieval looking gate at the corner in the foreground, the door of which is plastered with posters advertising Kolb Dill in "Higgledy Piggledy" on Monday, May 6. The roof of the Fairmont Hotel can be seen behind the Art Institute.
↑ Hedrick, Wally; Rubin, David S.; Hopps, Walter (June 26, 1985). Wally Hedrick: Selected works: Adaline Kent Award exhibition, April 10-May 11, 1985. San Francisco Art Institute. ISBN0930495004.
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