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Martha Shaw (left) and Richard Shaw (right) prepare for the 1975 Artists’ Soap Box Derby.



Although SFAI has never been a Division I athletic powerhouse, there have been NCAA champions, Olympians, Wimbledon winners, speed skaters, professional figure skaters, ultramarathoners, and water polo champions among its alumni, including a student who holds the title of World’s Fastest Female Barefoot Water Skier. And, of course, there has always been an avid corps of recreational athletes, who understood that competition isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, participating in trampoline, flag football, miniature golf, soap box derbies, and horseshoes.

 JG 


Students have also shown up in the cheering sections of local sports teams. For instance, in the summer of 1916, California School of Fine Arts students Dorothy Baronidis, Aleida Brick, and Lutz Dahl (Louise Dahl-Wolfe) dressed up in artists’ regalia to “add vivacity” to a San Francisco Seals baseball game, part of a fundraiser for the Palace of Fine Arts Preservation Fund. Dahl-Wolfe went on to become a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar from 1938 to 1958, where her photos helped define a new American style of “environmental” fashion photography. Recreational, creative sports are evident in Adaline Kent’s picnic with fellow students in Marin, ninety-six years ago, in 1924. These photos from Theo Trace’s scrapbook show Ruth Cravath, Maxine Albro, the Trace sisters, and Squire Knowles. Note the athletic Addie Kent at the top of this human pyramid. Kent was a vital part of the SFAI community for her entire life, as a student, board member, teacher, benefactor, and artist. Even in today’s era of extreme sports, human pyramids are beyond the skill level of many athletes. Fencing on campus, detail from 1935 mural in the school’s café. En garde! Perhaps it was Errol Flynn movies that led to the popularity of fencing at the school, as depicted in this 1935 mural that was once in the café: fencing, complete with good form and high-caliber equipment, in the courtyard. Helen Wills took classes at the school in the 1920s, after she studied at Berkeley. Wills was the inspiration for the central figure in Diego Rivera’s 1931 Pacific Stock Exchange mural Allegory of California. She painted, wrote poetry, and played tennis, winning eight Wimbledon championships and thirty-one Grand Slams. According to the indisputable Wikipedia, Wills was the “first American woman athlete to become a global celebrity.” Horseshoes on campus, detail from 1935 mural in the school’s café. The more sedate and cerebral sport of horseshoes also attracted some of the school’s athletes, again depicted in the 1935 café mural. Horseshoes was reputed to have been banned because it lent itself too readily to gambling. Portrait of George Wallace taken by Don Whyte, 1948. In the late 1940s, George Wallace studied in the first photography classes with Ansel Adams, Minor White, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. Wallace was also a self-trained world-champion speed skater who made the 1940 Olympic team—an Olympics that was cancelled because of World War II. Wallace invented the ExpoDisc, an aperture/depth-of-field photography tool. With the school receiving accreditation for the first time in the 1950s, and with the introduction of more non-studio courses and extracurricular activities, it is no wonder that big-time college athletics soon arrived on campus. It seems to have begun with table tennis in the 1950s, shown here in the school courtyard, with Wally Hedrick on the left. Fencing at SFAI, c. 1971. Photo: Stephen Gach. There appears to have been a hiatus in the fencing component of the school’s athletics program, but the fencers regrouped in the early 1970s, finding novel areas around campus for their lunges, feints, flèches, and footwork. Sports at SFAI, 1969. Photo: Stephen Gach. Trampoline and basketball competed for the limited space in the Zellerbach Quad after the completion of the 1969 Paffard Keatinge-Clay addition. Although the SFAI athletics program did not necessarily generate donations from alumni, sports were nevertheless prominently featured on the 1973–74 SFAI admissions catalog to lure students to the school. There was no department to design slick uniforms, so in 1975 it was street clothes, street shoes, no net, and old-school hoops. Flo Allen presided as the Soap Box Derby Queen. It was a veritable who’s who of mid-1970s Bay Area art folk. And if that isn’t cool enough, there is a terrific film by Amanda C. Pope titled The Incredible San Francisco Artists’ Soapbox Derby (1975), which won a SECA award from SFMOMA. The Artists’ Soap Box Derby was orchestrated by the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in 1975 and 1978. Even though this was a museum production, it had SFAI’s fingerprints all over it—it was irreverent, entertaining, brilliant, conceptual, kind of dangerous, and loaded with entrants and artists who were SFAI students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Artists were given $250 to build their cars. Sponsorship included everyone and anyone in San Francisco, from Cissie Swig to Ghirardelli Square, from the California State Automobile Association to Beefeater Gin, from Shreve & Co. to Wilkes Bashford haberdashery. Artists included Robert Kinmont (and Ben Kinmont), Lynn Hershman, Richard Shaw, Carlos Villa, Bonnie Sherk, Jeremy Anderson, Janet Delaney, Ursula Schneider, Phil Linhares, Tom Marioni, Eleanor Dickinson, Howard Fried, Valery Hardy, Jamie Rasmussen, Mike Henderson, Bill Allan, David Best, Bill Geis, Judith Linhares, Leo Valledor, Rodger Jacobsen, “Meadow,” Ant Farm, Bill Morehouse, Ivan Majdrakoff, Nancy Rubins, and Nell Sinton. This is a set of SFAI-affiliated photographers (alumni/faculty/both) who were photographed in 1975 by alumnus Mike Mandel for his series of 134 “photographers baseball cards.” Participants appeared decked out in their baseball gear on one side. The information side of the cards included height, weight, throwing hand, batting hand, favorite photographer, favorite camera, favorite developer, and favorite film. And of course, “Issued with . . . Topps Chewing Gum.” The 1975 SFAI soccer team was international, sported some good hair, wore nice SFAI T-shirts for uniforms, and included smoking. Howard Fried—alumnus, faculty member, and one of the founders of the Performance/Video Department (now the New Genres Department)—bridged the gap between the country-club world and the video art world with his 1975/76 The Burghers of Fort Worth. In the film, Fried took lessons from four golf pros in Fort Worth, Texas, and documented his swing and the learning outcomes. Steve Seid speaks of the reach of golf, SFAI, and local artists: “One of the best shows in the Potrero Hill location was a nine-hole golf course [Artists’ Olympics: Miniature Golf, 1984] with Howard Fried, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Chip Lord, Phil Garner, and a few others. Howard’s piece was pure sculpture, white instead of green felt, with no hole—a beautiful thing on the ground. Paul, in the corner of the gallery, had a 10-by-10-foot square of ice on a slight pitch melting in a specific direction. You were allowed to putt if you wore crampons. I loved that show.” There have been various recreational and competitive rowers at SFAI, notably Ray Mondini, Tom Loughlin, and Gordon Cook, all members of the Dolphin Club. Cook taught printmaking and, later, under the guidance of Joan Brown (who was also a Bay swimmer), started to paint. Gordon Cook became president of the Dolphin Club and had a classic wooden rowboat named in his honor there. He was a very respected artist among his peers, and an esteemed printmaker. He was in a drawing group with Wayne Thiebaud, and the two were good friends. After Cook died, Thiebaud wrote “that the art world will always miss artists like Gordon. He will not miss the world of art.” The athleticism evident at Adaline Kent’s picnic in 1924 was replicated in the energetic gymnastic gyrations of the 1978 Anne Bremer Memorial Library staff on the school’s roof. In the early 1980s, the Performance/Video Department incorporated athletics into its curriculum with a bowling component triggered by Howard Fried’s 1974 video Sustatense. Ceramics students and faculty invented their own form of bowling for a “Bowling for Dollars” fundraiser in the late 1980s. For the bowling pins, they fabricated ceramic busts of school staff (for example, Dean Fred Martin, President Bill Barrett, and faculty member Mark Van Proyen), placing them at the bottom of the ramp. They also constructed huge bowling balls that were rolled down to destroy the busts. “Bowling for Dollars” (short version); filmed by Annie Reiniger-Holleb; featuring cameos by Redd X, Richard Shaw, Bill Barrett, and Debora Iyall, and the busts of Fred Martin and Mark Van Proyen. Paul Kos navigated up the school’s board-form concrete walls, installing these additional Gargoyle pieces on the roof. If students could climb these sections, they would receive extra credit in Kos’s Performance/Video and New Genres classes. In October 1995, the cobbled-together SFAI cross country team competed in a Division III multi-college meet at Mills College. The SFAI Harriers contested for, and won, the Stephen Goldstine Trophy against California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts). The SFAI team consisted of Barbara Markel, Larry Fojtik, Shawn Weed, Benji Whalen, Glen Redpath, Jeff Gunderson, Hyemi Cho, Daryl Beck, Connor Redpath, Teresa Mayer, Kath Lybarger, and Jennifer Nelson (photographer). Performance/Video faculty member and alumnus Paul Kos brought his rock-climbing expertise into the gallery and into the student studios, encouraging those who had an athletic bent. Paul Kos’s Gargoyle VII, performed by Chris Vandiver in 1985 in the SFAI gallery (still from video by Kurt Lundblad), opened new connections between sport and art at SFAI. In the mid-1980s, Paul Kos’s beginning New Genres class challenged Tony Labat’s class of upper-division students to a game of broom hockey. Mid-2000s student Tess (Teresa) Wallace who, at 107 mph, became the World’s Fastest Female Barefoot Water Skier, according to Guinness World Records. The SFAI athletic facilities were temporarily expanded in 2016 with the addition of a pétanque court, which had been advocated for by faculty emeritus Henry Wessel and Paul Kos. Although SFAI was never sanctioned by the NCAA for violations, basketball did disappear for nearly twenty years after a new roof with vulnerable pavers shut down the program. However, basketball reappeared in August 2020 with ad hoc athletic director Robin Beard’s installation of a state-of-the-art hoop, now at ten feet. The 2016 flag football team was composed primarily of graduate students, and they played hard against their doppelgangers from California College of the Arts at Golden Gate Park.