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Bill Berkson’s Chalk


Author
Jeff Gunderson

Decade

1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s


Tags

Lectures The Library 
Pedagogy Poetry 
Symposia



Bill Berkson started teaching in New York City at the New School in 1964, and then taught at SFAI from 1984 until his retirement in 2008—and thus the dates on his box of chalk in the SFAI archives. Berkson wrote that he “could never count on there being any chalk” accompanying the “moveable green chalkboard in the Conference Room or the funny cantilevered black one” in the lecture hall. “Get your own chalk,” he told himself.

Berkson is part of a distinguished and eclectic group of non-studio faculty who have taught at SFAI from its earliest incarnation as the California School of Design under the auspices of the San Francisco Art Association in 1874. Curricular interests outside studio arts have always reflected current times and incorporated a wide range of disciplines: poetry, science, music, literature, religion, linguistics, semiotics, history, archaeology, urban studies, sociology, and of course art history and criticism.

 JG 

Bill Berkson with a group of students in the MacMillan Conference Room, aka Studio Berkson. Berkson taught poetry and art history, initiated the Summer Art Writing Conference, and organized the Visiting Artists Lectures from 1984 until 2008. Bill Berkson and Robert Rauschenberg talk about art with students in Studio 14, 2000.Bill Berkson organized the Visiting Artists Lectures from 1984 until 2008, and his stature in the contemporary art world ensured a cast of wonderful visitors, from Baldessari to Brainard; Denby to Denes to DeFeo; Onslow Ford to Oropallo; Gablik to Group Material, Ringgold to Ruscha; and Katz to Koch to Krazy Kat. Bill Berkson standing in front of Jay DeFeo’s The Rose, 1995. Courtesy: Constance Lewallen.Bill Berkson’s breadth of experience as a poet, art critic, art historian, and deep-diving participant in the art world kept him in close contact with art and artists, and he generously shared these connections with students, fellow faculty, and staff. Here Berkson is with Jay DeFeo’s The Rose as it is receiving its early conservation after a twenty-five-year hibernation in SFAI’s MacMillan Conference Room . . . aka Studio Berkson. Jane Berlandina Howard, a noted artist who painted a mural at Coit Tower, was also an art historian, and she taught art history courses at SFAI from 1936 through 1940. Berlandina studied art in Nice and Paris, briefly with Henri Matisse, before moving to the United States, where she met her husband, architect Henry Howard. She was very much involved with SFAI as an exhibiting artist and faculty member, as were other members of the Howard family including sculptors Adaline Kent and her husband, Robert Howard; painters Charles Howard and John Langley Howard; and Langley’s wife, the sculptor and alumna Blanche Phillips. Grace McCann Morley taught a series of courses at the school from 1938 through 1940, lecturing in conjunction with exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art and on Treasure Island, where she orchestrated the 1939/40 Golden Gate International Exposition. Morley served as the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) at its new location at Van Ness and McAllister in downtown San Francisco. Her first office as director was at the school on Chestnut Street, while she awaited the museum’s completion. Under her leadership, the museum had a packed schedule of ambitious exhibitions and programming, mounting between seventy and a hundred shows a year up through World War II, keeping the doors open until 10 pm six days a week, and creating the first film program at an American museum, “Art in Cinema.” Morley wanted to expand the museum’s scope, both in terms of what appeared on its walls and who came through its doors. She championed emerging artists, West Coast artists, and Latin American artists; did community outreach to local groups like scouts and labor unions; and even created a local TV show called Art in Your Life. Mark Rothko lecturing in Studio 18. Photo: William Heick.During the summers of 1947 and 1949, Mark Rothko taught painting classes as well as non-studio lecture courses titled Contemporary Art. In Rothko’s painting class everyone received a B; in his lecture class everyone got an A. Mark Rothko’s 1947 roll book for the lecture class, with his doodle that looks a little like a sketch of his Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944). In their biography Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham wrote that Spicer was hired to teach at the school in the fall of 1953; “when asked afterwards . . . what he taught, he replied, ‘Everything.’” Wally Hedrick said Spicer “taught us how to ‘take words’ and to use the library and do research.” Spicer’s teaching “was revolutionary, verging on the bizarre” and his students “were a wild bunch.” Spicer had students “improvise monologues about nuclear apocalypse” and “flirted daringly with androgyny,” having students portray characters from A Streetcar Named Desire: “One week we’d all be Stanley, the next week, Blanche.” Spicer was one of the six of The Six Gallery, along with Hedrick, Deborah Remington, David Simpson, Hayward King, and John Allen Ryan. For the opening exhibition, Spicer hung his poems on the walls. Jack Spicer collaborated with SFAI artists, which can be seen in his 1959 book Billy the Kid, illustrated by Jess. Gregory Bateson (left) and Mark Tobey at the Western Round Table on Modern Art. Photo: William Heick.In 1949, the director of the California School of Fine Arts, Douglas MacAgy, organized the Western Round Table on Modern Art with panelists that included Gregory Bateson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Darius Milhaud, Kenneth Burke, George Boas, Mark Tobey, and Marcel Duchamp. Bateson, a social scientist, linguist, and cyberneticist, was a good supplement to this roster of philosophers, artists, critics, musicians, and architects. While in the Bay Area, Bateson got to know other artists attached to the school such as photographer and filmmaker William Heick. Weldon Kees worked with Bateson at Langley Porter Hospital, and all three of them made films. Bateson taught at the school in 1951, and from 1959 through 1963. Gregory Bateson’s 1962 SFAI roll book.Gregory Bateson certainly geared his Laboratory Science course to SFAI students. Kathy Goodell remembers that Bateson “brought a lobster claw to the first day of class, and said we would spend the entire semester talking about how we could tell that it had once been alive. I still think about that class—it was pivotal on many levels.” Kenneth Rexroth, poet, essayist, and immense influence on Bay Area poetry and literature, taught art history at SFAI from 1962 to 1965. His faculty “Biography Questionaire” [sic] lists his college degree as “none, none”; his Major Exhibitions as “none, I don’t believe in them”; “2 Guggenheims”; “16 books, innumerable periodicals . . . I can’t remember all this stuff—why not look in Who’s Who.” Kenneth Rexroth’s tenure coincided with Richard Diebenkorn’s second stint as an SFAI teacher. Diebenkorn did a set of drawings of Rexroth, which were reproduced in Richard Diebenkorn: The Catalog Raisonné (2016). Drawing of Kenneth Rexroth. Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled, 1965, charcoal on paper (recto), graphite on paper (verso). © Richard Diebenkorn Foundation Richard Fiscus arrived on campus in 1955 as the dean of students, with an MA in education. He taught for nearly forty years. Richard Fiscus, Land's End from Golden Gate Suite, 1976, ADI Graphic Editions, Fikrat Al-Khouri (printer) Screenprint 56.5 x 76.5 cm (image), The Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, gift of David C. Temple, 1978.1.136.2 Image courtesy FAMSF.Richard Fiscus separated from his wife in the 1960s and took up with his longtime partner, Howard Troy. Fiscus was a self-taught painter, and his work was widely exhibited and acquired by museums and corporate collections—and even appeared in Woody Allen’s film Play It Again, Sam. Richard Fiscus was adored by students in all departments, who relied on his teaching talents, counseling skills, relentless frankness, and marvelous sense of humor to help them create a life in the arts. Jerry Burchard, who must have struggled with life at the school in the 1950s, said, “Fiscus was the guy you went to when your world was falling apart.” Retirement party for Richard Fiscus, 1995. Richard Miller taught American history in the Humanities Department from 1956 through 1978, and would occasionally hold class at Vesuvio Café in North Beach. He came to the school after being a factory worker, gravedigger, merchant seaman, and journalist. Miller was a World War II Marine, lefty progressive with a PhD in history, and dedicated pacifist . . . so much so that when lecturing on the Civil War, he brought a musket to class and fired it to illustrate the horrors of battle. Richard Miller authored thirteen books, and William S. Burroughs described his writing as “delirious and serious.” The cover of his Bohemia: The Protoculture Then and Now (1977) includes a blurb by Joan Baez: “a well-researched and well-written history of the artist as a societal mover from 1760 to the 1970's. Well done, Dick!” Bernard Mayes taught humanities at SFAI in the mid-1960s. Mayes was from England, where he had been an Anglican priest; he became an Episcopalian priest in the United States, as well as an actor and a radio announcer, at the beginnings of National Public Radio. He created the first suicide prevention hotline in San Francisco in 1962, which became a model for the rest of the world. A friend observed: “He was a faithful counselor and friend to all those who felt a little out of place.” His autobiography is titled Escaping God’s Closet: The Revelations of a Queer Priest (2001). Faculty biography questionnaire listing Bernard Mayes’s education, Cambridge University, “BA, MA, TD,” along with one of his other positions, “Director, Suicide Prevention Center, San Francisco, 1962–present.”Bernard Mayes writes in his autobiography that “during the 1960s the students . . . were nearly all hippies, many with considerable artistic talent. The final seminar of the year was conducted in a windowless basement room beside the studios, and since it was something of a celebration, the students were already ‘mellow’ with marijuana. Indeed, pot was smoked everywhere, by students and faculty alike, on this occasion supplemented by red wine and homemade cookies. I had selected one of our brighter students to deliver a paper and she had chosen for her theme, “The British Influence upon American Art Forms of the 20th Century.” But although this interesting subject was illustrated by slides and recordings of songs by the Beatles, it was being delivered in a monotonous voice as joints were being passed from hand to hand.” Ken Lash, a poet who also taught humanities, lived in Bolinas. He had students read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he was instrumental in making sure that SFAI was a “hive of intellectual activity and creative expression.” In 1968 Ken Lash and the Humanities Department issued its Report on a Three-Year Experiment in Teaching of Humanities at the College of the San Francisco Art Institute, an account of its Carnegie Corporation grant-supported overhaul of the school’s humanities curriculum. The new curriculum integrated the humanities and sciences into a single, four-year course of study. The Exploratorium at the Palace of Fine Arts was founded in 1969 by noted scientist Frank Oppenheimer. There has always been a close alliance between SFAI artists and the programming at the Exploratorium, with Oppenheimer serving as a faculty member in the World Studies (and Science) Department, and teaching a class for SFAI students in the Exploratorium titled Art and Perception. Ray Mondini taught in the various iterations of the Humanities, Letters and Science, and Liberal Studies Departments from around 1968 through around 2003. A dynamic lecturer and department chair, Mondini served as president of the faculty senate for decades. He was longtime chair of the Humanities Department, and he always incorporated current ideas and “Methodologies of Modernism” into the curriculum by hiring teachers such as Angela Davis and Kathy Acker. Ed Guerrero taught in what was then known as the World Studies Department from 1969 through 1979, alongside Ray Mondini, Richard Fiscus, Jan Butterfield, Angela Davis, Karen Ezekiel, Rupert Garcia, Zeese Papanikolas, Suzanne Lacy, and others. In 1972 he received an MFA in film, and he made Angela Davis: Walls into Bridges (PBS, 1979) when both he and Davis were on the school’s faculty. Guerrero is the author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (1993) and professor of Cinema Studies and Africana Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1976, SFAI hired activist and writer Angela Davis in the World Studies Department, where over the next fifteen years she would teach courses on Marxism and Art and Women’s Studies, as well as lecturing on current events and world affairs. Davis taught at SFAI until the early 1990s, when she joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is professor emeritus. SFAI’s summer session 1978 was publicized with a fold-out set of San Francisco postcard images that included a photo of the courtyard and pond. SFAI’s summer session was publicized on the verso. Non-studio courses included Language, Experience and Art, with George Lakoff, and Problems in Aesthetics, with Angela Davis. Peter Plagens organized a guest lecture series, and the Poetry Now class was taught by Philip Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Kathy Acker, poet, writer, biker, all things punk creative, first appeared at SFAI when Howard Fried hired her to teach in the Performance/Video Department for the 1980/81 school year. In the fall she taught with the Kipper Kids and in the spring she taught with David Ross. She returned when Ray Mondini hired her to teach contemporary fiction in the Letters and Science Department. By 1993 Acker’s class had evolved into Writing Private, for which students produced a 24-page magazine with the assistance of artist/designer and alumnus Rex Ray. Acker was part of the December 1991/January 1992 faculty show, and she did a reading in the lecture hall. KATHY ACKER“I’m very staid compared to my students, actually.” —Kathy Acker on the students at SFAIKathy Acker was a lot of things: experimental novelist, poet, academic, playwright, weight lifter, stripper, file clerk, porn performer, wife. Her writing drew on critical theory, appropriation, her own bisexuality, punk aesthetics, and formal experimentation, pushing buttons and boundaries (her novel Blood and Guts in High School was banned in Germany for glorifying incest). Acker lived restlessly, spending stretches of time in New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and London, and teaching at Roanoke College, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of Idaho, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Barbara. She was an adjunct professor at SFAI when she was diagnosed with the cancer that would soon take her life. After her death, San Francisco friends and colleagues scattered her ashes at Fort Funston and held a memorial at Slim’s nightclub. The event was organized by longtime SFAI faculty member Sharon Grace, who described the range of people who had been reached by Acker’s work this way:“Kathy appealed to neo-feminists, bad-boy cyberlibertarians, pierced and tattooed voodoo-ritual body artists, and academics. In this diverse bunch of people—from theoreticians to thrasher-punks—you find her complexity.”


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