Former name | School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts (1907–1908), California School of Arts and Crafts (1908–1935), California College of Arts and Crafts (1936–2002) |
---|---|
Type | Private art school |
Established | 1907 |
Endowment | $36.0 million (2019) [1] |
President | David C. Howse |
Academic staff | 500 |
Students | 1,390 |
Undergraduates | 1,063 |
Postgraduates | 327 |
Location | , , United States |
Campus | Urban 4 acres (1.6 ha) |
Colors | New teal, paper white, black |
Website | cca.edu |
The California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private [2] art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996, it opened a second campus in San Francisco; in 2022, the Oakland campus was closed and merged into the San Francisco campus. CCA enrolls[ when? ] approximately 1,239 undergraduates and 380 graduate students. [3]
CCA was founded in 1907 by Frederick Meyer in Berkeley as the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts during the height of the Arts and Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts movement originated in Europe during the late 19th century as a response to the industrial aesthetics of the machine age. Followers of the movement advocated an integrated approach to art, design, and craft. [4] The initial campus was in the "Studio Building" at 2045 Shattuck Avenue, and they had forty three enrolled students. [5]
In 1908 the school was renamed California School of Arts and Crafts. In 1910, the school moved to the site of the former Berkeley High School building at 2119 Allston Way (at Grove Street, now Martin Luther King Way). [5]
The college's Oakland campus location was acquired in 1922, when Meyer bought the four-acre James Treadwell estate at Broadway and College Avenue. Two of its buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. [6] After the San Francisco campus was opened, the Oakland campus continued to house the more traditional, craft based studios like the art glass, jewelry metal arts, printmaking, painting, sculpture and ceramic programs.
In 1936, it became the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). [7] [8] In 1940 a Master of Fine Arts program was established. [9]
In the 1980s, the college began renting various locations in San Francisco, and in 1996 it opened a campus in the city's Design District, converting a former Greyhound maintenance building. [10]
In 2003, the college changed its name to California College of the Arts, under the leadership of president Michael S. Roth. [7] [11]
In 2016, it was decided to close the Oakland campus and consolidate all activities at the San Francisco campus. The final day of classes at Oakland was May 6, 2022. The college said it will "redevelop the campus with community gathering spaces, affordable housing, office space for arts nonprofits and bike parking while preserving the campus’s cluster of historic buildings and trees." [12]
Clifton Hall, one of the dormitories at the Oakland campus, was bought by the city of Oakland to use for public housing. [13] Other parts of the Oakland campus remained unused in 2024, with plans to create a mixed-use development with hundreds of residential units. [14]
CCA offers 22 undergraduate and 10 graduate majors. [29] In 2021, CCA unveiled a BFA in Comics. [30] CCA confers the bachelor of fine arts (BFA), bachelor of arts (BA), bachelor of architecture (BArch), master of fine arts (MFA), master of arts (MA), master of architecture (MArch), master of advanced architectural design (MAAD), masters of design (MDes) [29] and master of business administration (MBA) degrees.
The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, located near the San Francisco campus in a facility on Kansas St., is a forum for contemporary culture. In 2013 the Wattis Institute recruited a new director, Anthony Huberman, formerly of Artist's Space in New York. [31]
In the U.S. News & World Report rankings for 2020, CCA ranked #10 in the country for graduate fine arts programs, [32] #4 in graphic design, [33] and #6 in ceramics. [34] PayScale lists[ when? ] CCA as the #1 art school in the United States for return on investment and #4 for average alumni salary (bachelor's degree). [35] [36] As of 2022, Niche rated CCA with an overall grade of B− (with B− for academics, A+ for diversity, and B− for value), reporting an acceptance rate of 85%, graduation rate of 67%, and average alumni starting salary of $29,400. [2] The average class size is 13 for undergraduate programs and 12 for graduate. [37] The student to faculty ratio is 8:1. [37]
CCA is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), and the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB).
Bernard Ralph Maybeck was an American architect in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the early 20th century. He was an instructor at University of California, Berkeley. Most of his major buildings were in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Frederick Heinrich Wilhelm Meyer, was a German-born American designer, academic administrator, and art educator, who was prominent in the Arts and Crafts Movement. He was a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area; and the founding president of the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts.
Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in the early 1950s, when he taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After serving as a Visiting Artist at several universities, he became a Professor of Studio Art at Stanford University.
Established in 1998, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art center in San Francisco, California, US, and part of the California College of the Arts. It holds exhibitions, lectures, and symposia, releases publications, and runs a residency program, Wattis.
Capp Street Project is an artist residency program that was originally located at 65 Capp Street in San Francisco, California. CSP was established as a program to nurture experimental art making in 1983 with the first visual arts residency in the United States dedicated solely to the creation and presentation of new art installations and conceptual art. The Capp Street Project name and concept has existed since 1983, although the physical space which the residency and exhibition program occupied has changed several times.
David Kenneth Ireland was an American sculptor, conceptual artist and Minimalist architect.
William Seltzer Rice was an American woodblock print artist, art educator and author, associated with the Arts and Crafts movement in Northern California.
Viola Frey was an American artist working in sculpture, painting and drawing, and professor emerita at California College of the Arts. She lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and was renowned for her larger-than-life, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
Trude Guermonprez, was a German-born American textile artist, designer and educator, known for her tapestry landscapes. Her Bauhaus-influenced disciplined abstraction for hand woven textiles greatly contributed to the American craft and fiber art movements of the 1950s, 60s and even into the 70s, particularly during her tenure at the California College of Arts and Crafts.
Bernice Bing was a Chinese American lesbian artist involved in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene in the 1960s. She was known for her interest in the Beats and Zen Buddhism, and for the "calligraphy-inspired abstraction" in her paintings, which she adopted after studying with Saburo Hasegawa.
Kay Sekimachi is an American fiber artist and weaver, best known for her three-dimensional woven monofilament hangings as well as her intricate baskets and bowls.
Perham Wilhelm Nahl was an American printmaker, painter, illustrator and an arts educator active in Northern California.
Maria Porges is an American artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an artist she is known for the prominent use of text in her visual works, which encompass sculpture, works on paper and assemblage and have an epistemological bent. As a critic Porges has written for Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture and SquareCylinder, among other publications.
Lia Cook is an American fiber artist noted for her work combining weaving with photography, painting, and digital technology. She lives and works in Berkeley, California, and is known for her weavings which expanded the traditional boundaries of textile arts. She has been a professor at California College of the Arts since 1976.
Rudolph Frederick Schaeffer an American arts educator and artist connected to the Arts and Crafts movement. He was the founder of the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design, a school that was based in San Francisco and produced designers, architects, interior decorators, teachers and colorists for more than 50 years. He was one of many pioneers in the study of color field, and has been credited with establishing the city of San Francisco as an International design center.
Byron August Wilson (1918–1992) was an American mid-20th century artist and educator, known for his jewelry design.
Nance O'Banion (1949-2018) was an Oakland based American artist who "pioneered creative explorations of handmade paper". She is known for her sculptural paper works and book works which focus on themes of change and transformation. A retrospective sample of the arc of her work may be viewed at: https://nance-obanion.com
Eric Spencer Macky, also known simply as Spencer Macky (1880–1958) was a New Zealand-born American painter, intaglio printmaker, academic administrator, and educator. He was president of the California College of Arts and Crafts, from 1944 until 1954. He also founded the Spencer Macky Art School in San Francisco, from 1916 until 1917. He was also known for his landscape paintings and scenes of San Francisco.
Margaret Penrose "Penny" Dhaemers (1926–2022) was an artist and professor in the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED), specializing in fine, visual, and textile arts. She was the first woman to chair the Department of Design (1970–74) and following a reorganization in which it was absorbed into the CED, chaired the CED Visual Studies Committee from 1976 until her retirement in 1994.
Daniel S. Defenbacher has resigned as President of the California College of Arts and Crafts. Joseph A. Danysh has been named Acting President