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SFAI students experimented with weightlessness in a series of travel classes with NASA at the turn of the twenty-first century.



The initial curriculum at the California School of Design included only painting and drawing—life classes and plein air classes—and sculpture. c. 1893: Arthur Mathews with Women’s Life Class. Paul Chadbourne Mills Archive of California Art, Oakland Museum of California. Things changed when Arthur Mathews was hired by Director Raymond Yelland to teach life classes and advanced drawing in 1890. After Yelland resigned, Mathews became director, a position he held until 1906. Mathews wrote that the school felt “impelled to abandon its pedagogic system and its diletant [sic] methods of art culture, and adopt a system adapted to the requirements of artists” with “the encouragement of an independent, but highly self-disciplined approach in student work, the abuse of which often resulted in harsh critical hours.” Mathews made significant changes, insisting that faculty teach only “courses that drew upon their specific strengths.” He also “instituted a schedule . . . that reduced the number of hours” instructors taught, “allowing them more time for their own creative work in order to be more effective teachers.” And he initiated “studies of anatomy and of life classes, where men and women students, in segregated classrooms, worked from nude or draped models.” —from Harvey Jones, The Art of Arthur and Lucia Mathews (San Francisco: Pomegranate, in collaboration with the Oakland Museum of California, 2006) “Under his tutelage the School of Design became famous, not only in this country but in Paris as well. He was a hard task master; his pupils feared him and a tenseness pervaded his classrooms as a result of his caustic comment and sarcastic demeanor during criticism hours.” —from California Art Research Mathews’s students were some of the most prominent California artists of the early twentieth century, including Armin Hansen, Florence Lundborg, Francis McComas, Xavier Martinez, Anne Bremer, Gottardo Piazzoni, Ralph Stackpole, Giuseppe Cadenasso, Isabel Hunter, Granville Redmond, Joseph Raphael, and Euphemia Charlton Fortune, as well as his wife, Lucia Kleinhans Mathews. The earthquake had shaken the psyche of San Francisco and, at some point after the temblor, separate Life Classes had been abandoned. Everyone worked together during studio hours with all the accompanying dangers of exposed electrical wiring. The curriculum in the early 1910s reflected an interest in the latest, newest, most avant-garde aspects of the contemporary art world, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and Modernista. Faculty, including Katherine Gillespie, Agatha van Erp, and Pedro Lemos, taught courses in graphic design, metalwork, leatherwork, lettering, and “concrete pottery.” Graphic design course, c. 1915, reflects the heyday of the California Arts and Crafts movement. In the 1920s through the 1930s, fresco classes were taught by Ray Boynton, Victor Arnautoff, and Maurice Sterne. This 1933 college catalog highlights a new course in “ceramics” with all “the necessary equipment including a kiln.” By 1935, the John I. Walter Ceramic Department was in place, with instructor Dr. Willi M. Cohn and assistant Gertrude R. Wall. The Sculpture Department sprawls outside, on the northwestern side of the school. Ansel Adams was associated with the school through friends like art patron Albert Bender. When he saw the space vacated by the Red Cross blood bank in the eastern wing of the building, he began planning a photography department with the blessing of the board chair, architect Eldridge “Ted” Spencer. By fall 1945 Adams had seed money from a grant secured from the Columbia Foundation. He started a six-week session, to be followed by a full class in the summer of 1946, and the launching of the Photography Department in the fall. Ansel Adams was a hands-on participant in the school’s darkroom, with Philip Hyde, John Bertolino, Muriel Green, and Pirkle Jones. As dogmatic as Adams could be, he hired a wide range of photographers as teachers: Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Lisette Model, and Alma Lavenson. Film faculty member Sidney Peterson (with cigarette and hat) and some great students—Bill Heick, Harlan Jackson, Beverly Campbell, Benjamen Chinn, Jo Landor, Jeremy Anderson, Nina Boas, and others—introduced San Francisco to a world of surrealist filmmaking. Sidney Peterson’s Workshop 20 class made a series of influential avant-garde films including The Cage, Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur, and The Lead Shoes.The California School of Fine Arts Workshop 20 film The Lead Shoes (1949) has a soundtrack by the Studio 13 Jass Band. After receiving accreditation in the mid-1950s, the school added non-studio courses, although they were somehow always geared to art students. This 1961 class taught by linguist, social scientist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson is listed as Laboratory Science. After the 1969 building was completed, there was space for an enlarged curriculum. MFA programs in photography and printmaking were instituted, and the much-expanded Film Department, headed by Robert Nelson, would soon include Lawrence Jordan, James Broughton, Phil Greene, Gunvor Nelson, Janis Lipzin, and George Kuchar. An explosion of performance, conceptual, and video work throughout the 1970s in San Francisco, much of it driven by SFAI faculty and students, prompted the creation in 1979 of a bona fide Performance/Video Department, with its delineated curriculum. One of the founders was Howard Fried, who had been teaching similar courses in the Sculpture Department. When there was a temporary vacancy in Studio 10, this new department invaded, with some of its initial funding coming from the sale of Eadweard Muybridge photographic prints that had been found in storage in the Anne Bremer Memorial Library. Paul Kos would write that “Studio 10 is arrogant and pompous. And humble and unassuming. It is brusque, brazen, and alive, welcoming and scary, but it is always . . . (hold your head up kind of snootily, and exaggerate) . . . a la BOR a tory.” The first chair of the Performance/Video Department was Howard Fried, who submitted his course descriptions reluctantly, succinctly, and poetically. SFAI’s first class trip to China in summer 1986, where students were welcomed to Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Academy. Pictured are Fred Martin, Ray Mondini, Stephanie Dudek, Eddie Lee, Elsa Marley, and Katie Moskowitz. Photo: Brenda Prager. Fred Martin organized the first student exchange of US art schools with mainland China in 1986. He and faculty member Ray Mondini traveled with a group of students that studied at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Academy and toured the country. This summer program lasted for years. One of the most notable took place in 1989, when the group had to cut its visit short because of student protest in Tiananmen Square. Printmaking faculty member and alumnus Charles Hobson taught artists’ book classes from the late 1980s through 2012. Introduced in the early 1980s by printmaker Richard Graf, artists’ books became a robust program at the school under Hobson. Hobson’s scrapbooks documenting his classes, his students, and their artists’ books are in the school’s archives. This image is of the fall 1990 class that included Mary Marsh, Barry McGee, Cheryl Coon, Brigitta Wolman, Stephen Faulk, and more. Barry McGee showing his artists’ book Fun with Mental Games along with the book’s “Koly fong,” “on Rives BFK rag paper. All prints are drypoints and spitbites. This edition is limited to six thousand & forty million copies signed by anyone who was able to forge my signature. Nov. 15, 1990. Love always . . . . . .” A 1993 art history course called QUEERING (A)GENDER(S): How to Have Fun in School was taught by Catherine Lord, Millie Wilson, and guests. It was for students “invested in queer (gay, lesbian, trans, etc.) culture” and focused on “the construction/subversion/transgression of gender performers with attention to histories of political resistance in life and in art. Attention will be given to the intersections of sexuality and with constructions of race and class.” Carlos Villa taught ongoing courses titled Worlds in Collision: Contemporary Cultures in Transition, which paralleled his long-running symposia and conferences at SFAI, including “Sources of a Distinct Majority,” “The Agenda for the 1990s,” and “A Challenge to Institutions: A Contextual Symposium,” all of which culminated in the 1994 publication Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues by Villa and photography faculty member Reagan Louie. Worlds in Collision: Dialogues on Multicultural Art Issues by Carlos Villa and Reagan Louie. Computers move into the New Imaging Center. Computers first appeared at the school in the early 1980s, in staff offices in the library (with Charles Stephanian), in the Film Department (with Roy Ramsing), and in the dean’s office (Fred Martin’s Atari). By 1985, the Performance/Video Department was the Performance/Video/Computer Arts Department. The first Internet accounts were secured for the library staff in the early 1990s via photography faculty member Jack Fulton, through a pilot program with the University of California, San Francisco. By the mid-1990s, Fulton, with Charles Hobson from printmaking and John Roloff from sculpture, developed a plan for a New Imaging Center, and by 1996 it was offering classes including Pulp Pop: Desktop Revolution, and Virtual Studio: Digital Wetlands on the Internet. Some staff have been perfect matches with SFAI’s concept of digital, computer, and design, such as Jesse Drew, Laetitia Sonami, Craig Baldwin, and Cristóbal Martinez. One of the first students in this program was Ben Wood (BFA, 2003), who would go on to study at MIT. His stereoscopic video installation Restoration: Restoring Diego Rivera’s San Francisco Art Institute Mural (2002) was projected opposite Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. This video homage to Rivera features faculty and staff, along with a rotating student as the central figure (replacing Rivera’s heroic blue-collar laborer), illustrative of the “importance of maintaining a focus to educate and work together.” In 1998, 2001, and 2004, students from SFAI took part in NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity, spending two weeks in Houston conducting experiments on NASA’s KC-135 turbojet, aka the Vomit Comet. The SFAI students’ experiments impressed their cohorts from Caltech, MIT, and Purdue. Also, unlike their NASA student comrades, none of the SFAI students got sick.


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