Founded in 1871, the San Francisco Art Institute is one of the U.S.’s oldest and most prestigious schools of higher education in contemporary art. It boasts an illustrious list of alumni in all of its areas of focus. But most important, it has consistently held fast to its core philosophy of creating programs where creativity and critical thinking are fostered in one of the most open, innovative, and interdisciplinary environments in higher education. At SFAI we focus on educating artists who will become the creative leaders of their generation.

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. The California School of Design (renamed California School of Fine Arts in 1916 and San Francisco Art Institute in 1961) was launched by SFAA two years later, and has been central to the development of many of this country’s most notable art movements. During its first sixty 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 US; Sargent Claude Johnson, one of the first African-American artists from California to achieve a national reputation; Louise Dahl-Wolf, an innovative photographer whose work for Harper’s Bazaar defined a new American style of “environmental” fashion photography in the 1930s; 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, invited by William Gerstle, the president of SFAA, to paint a fresco at the school’s new campus on Chestnut Street. Many of the school’s faculty had visited Rivera in Mexico, and the school had a distinguished program in fresco painting. Rivera’s arrival sparked intense debate in the city over a number of political, social, and artistic issues. In 1933 Ralph Stackpole, who, along with other faculty, had worked with Rivera on his mural commissions in San Francisco,asked the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to fund a series of murals for the interior of the new Coit Tower. This project became the prototype for the agency, and most of the artists employed were faculty or students at CSFA.



After 1945, the school became a nucleus for Abstract Expressionism. New York artists Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko taught here, along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, and others. 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 US, with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange among its instructors. The first film course at CSFA was taught by Sydney Peterson in 1947. Jordan Belson, who had enrolled as a painting student in 1944, showed his first abstract film, Transmutations, in 1947 at the second “Art in Cinema” program, co-sponsored by CSFA and the San Francisco Museum of Art. In 1949, an international conference, The Western Roundtable on Modern Art, was organized by CSFA Director Douglas McAgy, and included Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Gregory Bateson, among others. 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 CSFA as a painting student in 1949. In 1953 he, along with his partner, poet Robert Duncan, and painter Harry Jacobus, started the King Ubu Gallery, an important alternative space for art, poetry, and music. CSFA faculty Park, Bischoff, James Weeks, and Richard Diebenkorn were now the leaders of the new Bay Area Figurative Movement, informed by their experience of seeing local museum exhibitions of work by Edvard Munch, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec. A distinctly Californian modern art emerged—a fusion of abstraction, figuration, narrative, and jazz—in their work as well as that of their students, including William T. Wiley, Robert Hudson, William Allan, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, Carlos Villa, and Fred Martin. The students’ interest in new ideas and new materials became the core of the Funk Movement.



Renamed the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961, SFAI refuted the distinction between fine and applied arts, and expanded the definition of art to include performance, conceptual art, graphic arts, typography, and political and social documentary. 1968 was, as elsewhere in the world, a pivotal year in the history of SFAI. Among the students at SFAI that year were Annie Liebovitz, who had just begun photographing for Rolling Stone magazine; Paul McCarthy, well-known for his gross but hilarious performance videos; and Charles Bigelow, who would be among the first typographers to design fonts for computers. Alumni Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones (also faculty) were documenting the early days of the Black Panther Party in northern California, and the photographs were exhibited at the de Young Museum.