This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Oakley77 (talk | contribs) at 03:34, 26 July 2012 (Disambiguated: David Park → David Park (painter), Robert Hudson → Robert H. Hudson, Charles Bigelow → Charles Bigelow (type designer), the Avengers → Avengers (band); Unlinked: Clear). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Revision as of 03:34, 26 July 2012 by Oakley77 (talk | contribs) (Disambiguated: David Park → David Park (painter), Robert Hudson → Robert H. Hudson, Charles Bigelow → Charles Bigelow (type designer), the Avengers → Avengers (band); Unlinked: Clear)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) This article describes the San Francisco Art Institute, which should not be confused with unaffiliated school The Art Institute of California – San Francisco. | |
| Motto | "Thinking. Making. Learning." or "Accept No Limitations" |
|---|---|
| Type | Private |
| Established | 1871 |
| Chairman | Diane Frankel |
| President | Charles Demaris |
| Vice-president | Jeannene Przyblyski |
| Location | San Francisco, California,  United States37°48′12″N 122°25′02″W / 37.803456°N 122.417144°W / 37.803456; -122.417144 |
| Campus | Urban 4 acres (1.6 ha) |
| Colors | Gray and Clear |
| Website | sfai.edu |
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) is a school of higher education in contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in the Dogpatch neighborhood. The private, non-profit institution is accredited by WASC and is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. SFAI was founded in 1871, and is one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River
Academic programs
SFAI offers Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Bachelor of Fine Arts, and Master of Fine Arts degrees and Post-Baccalaureate certificates. Like many institutions of higher-education, it also awards honorary PhDs. SFAI's current Dean of Academic Affairs is Jeannene Przyblyski. Hou Hanru is Director of Exhibitions and Public Program and Chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies.
School of Studio Practice
The School of Studio Practice consists of the traditional departments of Painting, Sculpture, Film, Photography, Design+Technology, Printmaking, and New Genres.
School of Interdisciplinary Studies
Founded in 2006, SFAI's School of Interdisciplinary Studies offers BA and MA degrees in History and Theory of Contemporary Art, Urban Studies, and Exhibition and Museum Studies (MA only). It also houses four research and teaching centers: Public Practice, Media Culture, Art+Science, and Word, Text, and Image.
History
Founded in 1871 by artists, writers, and community leaders who possessed a cultural vision for the West, the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA) became a locus for artists and thinkers. Three years later, SFAA launched The California School of Design, which was renamed California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in 1916 and then the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961. 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; John Gutzon Borglum, the creator of the large-scale public sculpture known as Mt. Rushmore; and numerous others. In 1930, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera arrived in San Francisco to paint a mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, at the school’s new campus on Chestnut Street.
The fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed both the mansion and the school. A year later, the school was rebuilt on the site of the old mansion and renamed the San Francisco Institute of Art. In 1916 the SFAA merged with the San Francisco Society of Artists and assumed directorship of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, then located in the Palace of Fine Arts, a relic of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The school was also renamed the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). In 1926 the school moved to its present location at 800 Chestnut Street in San Francisco.
After World War II, the school became a nucleus for Abstract Expressionism, with faculty including Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Clay Spohn. Although painting and sculpture were the dominant mediums for many years, photography had also been among the course offerings. In 1946, Ansel Adams and Minor White established the first fine art photography department in the U.S., with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange among its instructors. In 1947, distinguished filmmaker Sydney Peterson began the first film courses at CSFA. In this spirit of advancement, in 1949 CSFA Director Douglas MacAgy organized an international conference, The Western Roundtable on Modern Art, which included Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Gregory Bateson. The object of the roundtable was to expose “hidden assumptions” and to frame new questions about art.
By the early 1950s, San Francisco’s North Beach was 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. A distinctly Californian modern art soon emerged that fused abstraction, figuration, narrative, and jazz. SFAI faculty David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks, Frank Lobdell, and Richard Diebenkorn were now the leaders of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, informed by their experience of seeing local museum exhibitions of work by Edvard Munch, Max Beckmann, Edgar Degas, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. Students at the school, including William T. Wiley, Robert Hudson, William Allan, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, Carlos Villa, and Wally Hedrick, continued the investigation of new ideas and new materials, becoming the core of the Funk art Movement. In 1961 the school took its modern name, the San Francisco Art Institute.
Renamed the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961, SFAI refuted the distinction between fine and applied arts. SFAI was at the forefront of recognizing an expanded vocabulary of art making that was a hybrid of many practices including performance, conceptual art, new media, graphic arts, typography, and political and social documentary. Among the students in the early to mid 1960s were artists Ronald Davis, Robert Graham, Forrest Myers, Leo Valledor, Michael Heizer, Ronnie Landfield, Peter Reginato, Gary Stephan, and John Duff and in the late '60s Annie Leibovitz, who would soon begin photographing for Rolling Stone magazine; Paul McCarthy, well-known for his performance and sculpture works; and Charles Bigelow, who would be among the first typographers to design fonts for computers. Alumni Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones were documenting the early days of the Black Panther Party in northern California. Installation art, video, music, and social activism continued to inform much of the work of faculty and students in the 1970s and ’80s. 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 Laboratory, 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.
In 1969, a new addition to the building by Paffard Keatinge-Clay added 22,500 sq ft (2,090 m) studio space, a large theater/lecture hall, outdoor amphitheater, galleries, and cafe.
On or about February 4, 2009, a group of SFAI Trustees authorized a declaration of "financial exigency" for the school. Under SFAI's contract with faculty, financial exigency is "the critical and urgent need for the Institute to reorder its expenditures in such a way as to retain solvency." Pursuant to the claim of financial exigency, on or about February 17, 2009, President Bratton issued layoff notices to nearly 25% of SFAI's tenured faculty. The affected faculty had taught at SFAI from 11 to over 31 years. Many of the teachers were of high artistic and scholarly calibre, two of whom received top teaching awards in the year of their layoff. Students and alumni quickly organized to protest the layoffs, and questioned certain decisions and acts made in connection with the layoffs. Student and alumni activists launched an online wiki, and in May 2009 launched a website to keep the SFAI community and other concerned members of the public updated on recent developments. An accountant hired by the faculty union concluded that financial exigency did not exist, and students, alumni and faculty continue to challenge the layoffs.
Photography
Founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, the Photography Department was the first program of its kind dedicated to exploring photography as a fine art medium. Adams attracted fine photographers for the original faculty, including Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, and Minor White, and Morley Baer, who became Head of the Department after White's departure in 1953.
Music
In 1966, the SFAI organized an exhibition of rock and roll posters. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, SFAI was one of the centers of the San Francisco punk rock and new wave music scene.
Among the many artist musicians who studied at SFAI are Jerry Garcia, guitarist in Grateful Dead; Mike Henderson painter and blues musician; Dave Getz, drummer for Big Brother and the Holding Company and Country Joe and the Fish; Prairie Prince and Michael Cotten of the The Tubes; Debora Iyall and Frank Zincavage of Romeo Void; Freddy (aka Fritz) of the Mutants; Penelope Houston of the Avengers, Courtney Love, actress and rock musician; Nathan Burazer, and Jonathan Holland of Tussle; Cliff Hengst and Scott Hewicker of Troll; Devendra Banhart; Robert Earl Davis, band leader of The Earl Brothers.
Housing
SFAI maintained a small student housing program in the MacArthur neighborhood of the Presidio of San Francisco from 2002 to 2007. Students were housed primarily in semi-furnished townhouse apartments built in the 1960s with space for approximately 45 students. During the 2006/2007 academic year, some apartments in the Baker Beach neighborhood were used with space for an additional 20 students. In August 2007, SFAI transitioned to a more traditional student housing model and converted a 1907 hotel at 140 Mason Street in Union Square to an unnamed residence hall. The Union Square property housed up to 125 students. 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. Prior to 2002, students typically found housing on their own with some guidance from the institution, though at one time SFAI owned a small number of apartment units near its Russian Hill campus.
Exhibitions and Public Programs
Students are given direct access to exhibitions, lectures, symposia, films, and other unique interdisciplinary events. An integral part of campus life, such events connect 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 have the opportunity to show their own work in a number of spots on SFAI's two campuses, including the Diego Rivera Gallery.
Adeline Kent Award
Former board member (1947–1957), Adeline 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. Each year since 1957 the prize was awarded by the San Francisco Art Institute Artists' Committee. Winners included Ron Nagle (1978), Wally Hedrick (1985), Mildred Howard (1991), Clare Rojas (2004), and Scott Williams (artist) (2005).
While no announcement has been made about the status of the bequeathed gift, the prize has not been awarded since the San Francisco Art Institute Artists' Committee was disbanded in 2005.
Notable current faculty
- Linda Connor, large-format photographer.
- Trisha Donnelly.
- Sharon Grace.
- Renee Green.
- Hou Hanru.
- Lynn Hershman Leeson.
- Mike Kuchar.
- Jane McGonigal, game theorist.
- Henry Wessel, Jr., one of the New Topography photographers.
- Griff Williams.
Notable former faculty
- Kathy Acker.
- Ansel Adams, landscape photographer, founded the photography department in 1945.
- Roy Ascott, Dean 1975-1978.
- Blixa Bargeld, musician (2008).
- Charles Boone, composer.
- Stan Brakhage, filmmaker.
- John Collier (anthropologist), visual anthropologist
- Imogen Cunningham, portrait photographer.
- Angela Davis (1976).
- Howard Fried, installation, performance, video artist, founded the New Genres department.
- Doug Hall.
- Wally Hedrick.
- Pirkle Jones, photographer.
- Pat Klein, painter.
- George Kuchar (1972–2011), filmmaker.
- Dorothea Lange, photographer.
- Leo Lentelli, sculptor.
- Janis Crystal Lipzin, film/photo artist.
- Lydia Lunch.
- Arthur Frank Mathews, muralist, painter.
- Frederick Meyer, founder of the California College of the Arts (1907).
- Bruce Nauman, Process & Conceptual Art.
- Suzanne Olmsted, photographer, printmaker.
- Charlemagne Palestine.
- Sidney Peterson, film director, initiated first film courses at SFAI (1947).
- John Rapko, philosopher of art.
- Mark Rothko, painter (1947).
- Richard Shaw, ceramic sculptor.
- Hassel Smith, painter.
- Ralph Stackpole, sculptor, painter.
- Clyfford Still, painter (1946).
- Larry Sultan, photographer
- Minor White, photographer.
- Al Wong, filmmaker.
Notable alumni and former students
Index of San Francisco Art Institute Alumni
Some alumni of the institute include:
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References
- History of SFAI- San Francisco Art Institute
- SFAI Student Blog
- SFAI Student and Alumni Action Group/Concerned Students and Alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute
- Howard Bunsis Report to Faculty Union of the San Francisco Art Institute
- Entertainment Weekly, 1994: The Power of Love
- "Exhibitions and Public Programs." San Francisco Art Institute website
- "Adeline Kent, 1924" San Francisco Art Institute website
- Amazon page Ron Nagle catalog
- Amazon page for Wally Hedrick catalog
- Paule Anglim website on Clare Rojas
- Stencil Archive website announcing Scott Williams Adeline Kent Award Exhibition at SFAI
- http://viola.sfai.edu/course/category.php?id=5
- http://en.wikipedia.org/Wally_Hedrick
- http://en.wikipedia.org/Bruce_Nauman
- Official alumni list
See also
External links
- San Francisco Art Institute official website
- CineSource Magazine - Local Film Schools: A Plethora of Riches
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