When the historic San Francisco Art Institute shuttered in 2022, the school’s longtime librarians were determined to save as much of its history as possible.
In a cozy basement space beneath the Goethe-Institut and Crown Point Press at 20 Hawthorne St., Jeff Gunderson and Becky Alexander manage the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive, a repository for thousands of pieces of archival documents and ephemera from the school’s 151-year existence which they make available to peruse by appointment.
During its 150 years of operations, SFAI was a hotbed of innovation and experimentation in the arts. Eadweard Muybridge screened the first known motion picture there. Ansel Adams founded the first fine art photography department. It was a hub for the Beat Generation, the Bay Area Figurative Movement and the Mission School. Its closure came as a blow not only to the local scene, but the global art world. The school may be gone, but the Archive ensures that it is not forgotten. Whether you’re a researcher, alum or art enthusiast, it’s a place you can go to connect with some of the City’s richest art history. (The California Academy of Studio Arts, an organization operating under a non-profit founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, now operates in SFAI's landmark campus.)
In addition to the school’s records, from meeting minutes to course rosters, the archive is packed with analog media, from reel-to-reel audio recordings to Hi8 tapes. Some highlights include interviews with the students from early days in the photography department and the history of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, including the museum’s architectural plans.
A major digitization effort is underway to ensure as much of the collection as possible can be preserved and offered for research purposes. But even with digitization top of mind, that doesn’t mean the physical archive is going anywhere.
“A lot of people think we’ll digitize and throw the stuff away,” Alexander said. “But a lot can go wrong with digital files. We keep everything.”
There are also things that can’t be digitized, like a pair of swimsuits once belonging to the painter Joan Brown, a ceramic self-portrait by the Beat artist Wally Hedrick, poet and art critic Bill Berkson’s blackboard chalk, and the last pack of cigarettes this reporter, an SFAI alum, ever smoked.
Initially, the Archive benefited from federal support but earlier this year, federal funding vanished as the Trump administration slashed the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with other agencies. Thanks to a handful of private donations and grants, the Archive is in a slightly less precarious place.
“We’ve received so much good will from alumni and people who valued the school in different ways, which is a lot of the San Francisco arts community,” Alexander said.
In the hallway just outside the Archive, Alexander and Gunderson curate exhibitions of items from the collection. The current show is a deep dive into the Six Gallery where Allen Ginsberg first read “Howl” in 1955. The project has also proven a source of private funding, sponsored by a grant from the Deborah Remington Charitable Trust for the Visual Arts. Remington herself was a student at SFAI and one of the artists involved in the Six Gallery.
“It’s wonderful to have these original documents and materials and manuscripts and ephemera that reflects San Francisco’s cultural history,” Gunderson said. “We’re trying to figure out the best ways to make them accessible to researchers and a general public audience.”
SFAI is the subject of a current exhibition at SFMOMA, which tapped the Archive for research and materials. Both the museum show and the Archive have recently welcomed field trip groups from high school and college students, including those from the California College of the Arts, the Bay Area’s last remaining non-profit fine arts college.
“I hope to infuse the archives with the spirit of the school as much as possible so that if you dig into some of the materials it quickly becomes apparent what was interesting about the place and the people there,” Alexander said. “It’s not the same as being there, but I hope that we can try to keep some of that available in the form of the archives and make the archives a place where you can get a sense of what was meaningful about the school.”
Gunderson also hopes the Archive can preserve the spirit of the school for a generation of young artists who didn’t get the chance to experience it firsthand. That spirit, he said, boils down to one simple tenet: “Do what you want to do and the hell with everything else.”
