“SFAI’s leadership has no clear path to admit a class of new students for the fall of 2020. Given our current financial situation, and what we expect to be a precipitous decline in enrollment due to the pandemic, we are now considering the suspension of our regular courses and degree programs starting immediately after graduation in May of this year…”

On Monday, March 23, San Francisco Art Institute announced that it will close its doors, possibly for good.

The institution was home to the nation’s first fine art photography program, founded by Ansel Adams in 1945 and led by a luminary faculty cohort including Dorothea Lange, Imogene Cunningham, Minor White, Lisette Model, and Edward Weston. In 1968, Annie Liebovitz started photographing for Rolling Stone magazine while still a student, and Ruth-Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones documented the Black Panther Party at the height of its social and political power. The list of significant milestones and moments goes on.

If SFAI remains shuttered, it will be a loss to art communities both locally and across the globe. Humble’s senior editor Roula Seikaly asked SFAI alumni and instructors to share their thoughts on the time they spent on the North Beach campus, and why the school and the people they encountered there were important to their personal and creative growth.

Images of SF Art Institue campus and facilities © Lonnie Graham

Rafael Soldi
I spent a beautiful summer teaching at SFAI. As someone who does not live in San Francisco, to have the opportunity to visit that campus daily: walking in through its Spanish colonial arches, passing by the Rivera mural, across the brutalist addition, through the terraces to overlook the city from atop a hill. That was a daily gift. Working with high school students on creative and narrative photography projects, the building and its surroundings lent such a fun backdrop to work with. The people I met and got to work with at SFAI were all excellent, knowledgeable, and kind to me. I'm very sad to see it go and I hope that the site, which holds so much history and beauty, can make a sensible transition.

Eirik Johnson
Where do I even start to unpack the experiences that comprised the two years I spent pursuing a Masters of Fine Art at the San Francisco Art Institute? To be honest, since the school announced its impending closure, I, like many other alumni, have been in a state of constant reflection on what for me was a pivotal time. I

imagine it starts with the place. The building itself, a Brutalist dynamo, jetting out like a watchtower over the San Francisco Bay. Within it, courtyards, woodshops, darkrooms, film studios, crit spaces, and a student-curated gallery space guarded over by an imposing Diego Rivera fresco mural. Everything about the place smelled of creative potential. And then there was the city. San Francisco in 2001 was already on its way to becoming the playground for tech wealthy it is today, but it was still very much a place for a young artist to “drift.”

But in the end, it was about the people. Professors who inspired and provoked. There was “the” Linda Connor (she’s earned “the”) who would burn out bulbs in slide projectors while waxing into the night about the sacred and profane. Henry (Hank) Wessel, who would calm post critique anxiety over lunch at the nearby Indian buffet with the mantra “just go make more pictures”. Jack Fulton, the one-time official photographer for “Geodesic Dome Magazine,” who led us into the high country desert of Nevada in pursuit of hot springs and whatever else we ran over. Doug Hall, J. John Priola, Tony Labat, Ann Chamberlain, Paul Kos, Jeannene Przybliski, Jon Rubin, all amazing artists and critics in their own right and all of who left their stamp on my formative years as an artist.

Like many who’ve gone to graduate school, I remain dear friends with my tribe of classmates from SFAI. Some are working artists and well-known photographers, some teach, others are directors of non-profits, and some are tech innovators and designers. Even when the school is gone, we’ll still have our tribe. But what saddens me most is that future art students won’t be able to find their own tribe at the watchtower above the Bay.

Marcela Pardo Ariza
I was drawn to the queer legacy of San Francisco and the photographic history of SFAI, and throughout my MFA, both of these became my artistic home. The school has been around for nearly 150 years and its heritage in the city is incredibly palpable; alumni of all ages run alternative spaces, galleries, nonprofits, and all size institutions. I quickly started making a mental map of how everyone was somehow interconnected, and most of the time, it came back to the school.

I think I got lucky, my time at SFAI was considerably special. I met incredible mentors that I feel so deeply grateful for Lindsey White, Ryan Tacata, and John Priola. Professors that influenced my own version of teaching: Asuka Ohsawa, Maria Elena Gonzáles, John Chiara and Josh Smith. I met brilliant curators that keep making the Bay Area a special place: Cristina Linden, Katie Hood Morgan, Hesse Mcgraw, and Jordan Stein. And a transnational, mostly queer, artist cohort I would have never changed: Simón Garcia Minaúr, Ana Maria Montenegro, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Juan Pablo Pacheco, Jackie Valle, Enar de Dios Rodriguez, Laura Rokas, Izidora Leber, Rachelle Bussieres. And of course, my collaborator of Womxn Art Handlers, Kat Trataris.

Overall, the most meaningful connection I have to the school is the people in it, and the fierce, unapologetically dedication to experimentation and thought-provoking art-making. What we need the most after the school transforms in this difficult time, is intention about the ways we honor these sweet connections and continue to mentor each other moving forward.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto
The San Francisco Art Institute was a radical institution, especially when viewing it in the context of the rest of the United States. I was lucky that SFAI was my first point of entry. I made friends with people with the same dreamy eyes that I had, unbending in their ethics, we explored memory together, we made murals, photos, videos, posters and tapestries. We performed for each other preparing ourselves for the world outside. Our minds expanded, we assumed nothing and we were curious about everything. There are few of us that stayed in San Francisco, most of us live thousands of miles apart but we still hold each other in our hearts, what we have is a special, daring and an intimately creative connection.

I think of the incredible teaching staff, Art Hazelwood who taught me screen printing, even though I never actually took his class, today screen printing is my main visual medium. I think of Tim Berry, Rigo 23, Sebastian Alvarez, Nicole Archer, Josh Smith, Ryan Tacata, Xandra Ibarra, Lindsey White, Sampada Aranke, Asuka Ohsawa, and Thea Quiray Tagle. I was taught and mentored by these incredible voices, they genuinely cared deeply for the well-being of their students. They wanted to inspire and be inspired and it is in no way an exaggeration to say that I would not be doing what I do today had it not been for their dedication and enthusiasm.

The school’s collapse was definitely a shock to my system, I mourn SFAI’s closure and I think very much of the staff and teachers who must now fend for themselves. In the wake of both a global pandemic and the closure of SFAI it becomes even more important for artists to ask crucial and existential questions we’ve put on the back burner. Working artists have come to depend on institutional validation but who were these institutions truly serving to begin with? What are the new possibilities that now lay ahead of us?

Janet Delaney
Thoughts on my time at SFAI 1979-1981:

I chose SFAI for graduate work because I read a conversation between Reagan Louie and Jim Pomeroy about Marxism and its relationship to art in the SFAI school newspaper. Once I arrived in the program that conversation seemed buried in the background but there was definitely a strong sense of the importance of making work that spoke to a larger audience beyond the confines of the art market. In my first year, I met Connie Hatch and we collaborated closely on the initial South of Market Survey. I returned to that project thirty years later and am still sorting out my understanding of cities and of the way art can represent them.

I remember my time at the Art Institute as a blessing in that I was able to fully immerse myself in my work; it was similar to going to a monastery. I worked with Reagan Louie, Linda Conner, and Larry Sultan among others. But I also remember it felt like I was part of a dysfunctional family. Perhaps the period of graduate school is akin to one's adolescence in the art-making process. I was impatient, often angry and not sure of what I was doing. But I got enough of a grounding that I was able to forge a life as an artist. I taught for 30+ years, 15 of them at UC Berkeley and have continued to use art as the fulcrum for my life.

Lonnie Graham
I run the risk of the vast number of my personal stories bordering on the edge of tedium. There are highlights. During the era of the new wave or punk rock, any number of individuals attempting to be edgy would find any excuse to self mutilate behead chickens or release inert gas into the atmosphere at any given time. I was a strict traditionalist given to fits of contemplation and awkward shyness. My professors found me inscrutable. Meanwhile, early performance artists like Pat Olesko would show up and do performances in the quad. I enjoyed frequent lunches with Angela Davis my social studies teacher. She and Ed Guerrero now at New York University once helped me plot a course on a Michelin map from Fez across the great Sahara desert to the Nile River.

One warm, unusually warm for San Francisco afternoon during our class, I was falling asleep. A frantic young photographer brought a welcome interruption. Having a few words with our instructor Hank Wessel he proceeded to remove a number of prints from a box. The prints had words scrawled all over them. It seemed this guy had gone from the tenderloin into across the street up into Nob Hill and made photographs of individuals he found in each neighborhood. He printed the images and then took them back to the sitters and had them inscribe their thoughts on the images. These rich and poor people struck a resonant contrast. We proceeded to give Jim Goldberg a righteous critique.

Meghann Riepenhoff
The centerpiece of my MFA show was a video piece where I wrote with fire on a window, “I don’t know how to say this”. I find myself there once again when asked to share something about SFAI. I’d need to write a book of many volumes to describe the beautiful wildness I experienced while learning and teaching there, so maybe I’ll just say this: it was a truly magical experiment, and my life is profoundly and forever changed by the artists I encountered there.

Artists Reflect on the Sudden Closing of San Francisco Art Institute