I studied at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 2010s, at what felt like the tail end of a period during which the Northern California art scene was defined by resistance to the tech takeover of The City. It was the last institutional gasp of the DIY ethos that refused, and continues to refuse, to separate politics from art. Nowhere did that spirit burn brighter than at SFAI.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) recently opened an exhibition titled “People Make This Place: SFAI Stories” [which continues through next July, you’ve got time—Ed.] commemorating the school and celebrating its outsized impact on the San Francisco art world and beyond. The school shuttered in 2022, shortly after celebrating its 150-year anniversary by filing for bankruptcy. The future of the historic campus at 800 Chestnut Street on Russian Hill was uncertain for a few years, until it was purchased for about $30 million, along with its Diego Rivera mural (whose market value alone exceeds that $30 million), by a non-profit consortium headed by Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs.
Recently, Powell Jobs revealed her intention to turn the building into the California Academy of Studio Arts (CASA), which will offer up to 30 emerging artists a year-long studio residency. The program will be free and unaccredited, offering a range of support for artists in addition to studio space, including mentorships and workshops. While some might see the reopening of the campus as a boon, I see it as the final nail in the school’s coffin.
“People Make This Place” emphasizes and elucidates the sheer scope of SFAI’s impact. Works of art by former students and faculty members that belong to the museum’s permanent collection are displayed alongside droves of ephemera from the SFMOMA archive and the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive. From the founding of the world’s first fine art photography department in 1945 to the earliest days of the Abstract Expressionist and Bay Area Figurative movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to the graffiti scene that evolved into the Mission School in the early 2000s, SFAI touched every aspect of 20th century art in the Bay Area and well beyond.
The school’s outsized impact was not limited to the art world. From its embrace of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s to the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s and 80s, it impacted and shaped the cultural era from flower power to punk rock. “SFAI Stories” demonstrates that the school encouraged anti-capitalist views and activism, and an ethos embracing risk-prone aesthetics. It was an art focused think tank.
By the time I entered SFAI, and even earlier, the school was beleaguered by financial setbacks. In 2017, the school’s graduate campus moved from Third Street into a newly renovated pier at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture costing $14 million. I’m not interested in faulting the school for misallocation of funds. SFAI is hardly the first school or arts institution to face financial shortfalls. My question is, where were Powell Jobs and other so-called philanthropists like her when SFAI was in dire financial straits? There is no shortage of money in the Bay Area. But it seems that there is a shortage of patrons willing to step up and pitch in for the arts when the gesture would be truly altruistic and the results beyond their control.
I can understand why so many alumni are hopeful for the future of the California Academy of Studio Arts. We loved SFAI and we want to see it live on in some way, shape or form. But while not too much about CASA has been made public yet, one thing is clear: it cannot be a continuation of, nor a replacement for, SFAI. It will be something new and different — and essentially divorced from the ethos that made SFAI what it was.
The SFAI I remember was anti-corporate, anti-tech and anti-fascist, a place that produced a renegade artistic spirit while offering a sanctuary for spirited artists as the city became financially inhospitable to its creative class. We shouldn’t be trusting tech oligarchs to run the show when it comes to arts and education, especially not those who time and again make nice with the Trump administration. SFAI was a place shaped for artists by artists. I’ve written before about my wariness of allowing tech CEOs to remake the arts in their own image. I think it’s important to ask ourselves why they appear to care now, at a time when the war for American consciousness is being waged more than ever in the cultural sector.
Remember how, during the mid-aughts and 2010s, the rallying cry of San Francisco’s then-beleaguered art community was the snarky little slogan “Die Techie Scum”? The phrase proliferated throughout the city on protest signs, tee shirts worn to gallery openings and graffiti tags vying for their place on the bathroom walls of underground music venues. Those words ring hollow now, a rhetorical relic from a time when we were all fed up but had some fight left in us. When did that unapologetic punk attitude of holding our own and giving a middle finger to the techno fascist freaks ruining our city turn into capitulation? When did the art community start begging for what few scraps the oligarchy is willing to toss down to us? And why should we play nice when they most certainly have not?
The spirit of the San Francisco Art Institute won’t live on at 800 Chestnut Street. It’s up to us — the people who made that place what it was — to continue shaping the city and its art scene in the image of liberation and creative freedom. To me, that looks like scrappy, unapologetic perseverance in spite of the same forces that have always tried to capitalize on the work of the creative class while simultaneously undermining it. The war rages on. The struggle is real. Now is not the time to surrender.
