<![CDATA[SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive

<![CDATA[SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive - Archive Blog]]>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:08:27 -0800EditMySite<![CDATA[Fall Update: Save the Dates!]]>Sat, 05 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.sfailegacyarchive.org/archive-blog/fall-update-save-the-datesHello friends of the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive,

We’ve got a lot in the works this fall! We wanted to share some of what we’ve been up to with you, and let you know about a few upcoming events:

Downtown SF Walking tours start this coming Sunday!

Starting this coming Sunday afternoon, October 20, we will be hosting a series of free walking tours that wander various routes through downtown SF, illuminating hidden histories of art and artists in the city. Some tour stops will overlap from tour to tour, but each will also be a little different, drawing on the knowledge of a truly wonderful assortment of guest experts who will share about the artists, artworks, places, and historical moments that are particularly meaningful to them.

On Sunday, our first walk–featuring amazing guest experts Berit Potter and Jordan Stein–will focus on women, art, and downtown.

Dates and themes:

Sunday, October 20: Women/Art/Downtown: Stories of some extremely cool women making and curating art in the city.
Sunday, October 27: Creation and Destruction Walking Tour: On the connection between art and artists and the forces that have by turns built and destroyed the city (earthquake, fire, city planning, racial injustice, money flowing in, money flowing out…)
Sunday, November 3: Creation and Destruction Walking Tour (a second iteration).
Sunday, November 24: Six Views of Union Square: new perspectives on a place you thought you knew.
Friday, December 6 (THIS DATE TENTATIVE): The play Hooky With Us Tour: There are some things you can only see in downtown SF during the work week, including, for example, Diego Rivera’s Allegory of California fresco painted for the Pacific Stock Exchange building.

Cross your fingers for good weather and join us on a tour! RSVP HERE.
BIG THANKS to SF Parks Alliance for supporting these tours!!

Ongoing: Researchers and Projects

Researchers: Sharing the SFAI Archives with researchers from across the city and world continues to be both fun and meaningful.

Recent research topics have included, among many others: Victor Arnautoff’s murals in the SFAI library; experimental musician Terry Riley; an SFAI alum’s grandfather’s time as a student in the 1940s (turns out that he took–and failed–a Clyfford Still class!); a chunk of piano dismembered as part of a final performance that took place at the famed 6 Gallery on Fillmore Street before its closure.

Coming Soon: SFAI Diego Rivera Mural Photogrammetry Project

Our research and archival ephemera will soon be featured alongside a website devoted to photogrammetry of the mural Diego Rivera painted at SFAI in 1931. This extremely cool project was completed by Cultural Heritage Imaging in the school’s very final days of existence, and we are excited to see it go live. For more info, see Will Maynez’s Friends of Diego Newsletter.

Coming Soon: Online Historical Course Catalog Collection

The as-full-as-possible run of SFAI College Catalogs, from very early days on, will soon be available online, thanks to assistance from the California State Library’s California Revealed program. More than just course listings, these are full of great photos, interviews with students and faculty, etc. We look forward to sharing them with you.

]]><![CDATA[Updates from the SFAI Archives: Late Spring Edition!]]>Tue, 02 Apr 2024 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.sfailegacyarchive.org/archive-blog/updates-from-the-sfai-archives-late-spring-editionThe SFAA Film Festival

We were so happy to have a visit from the amazing teacher and printmaker Art Hazelwood, with some hot-off-the-presses posters he designed and hand-printed for the upcoming SF Artists Alumni “Studio 8 Film Festival” to be held at 3 Bay Area venues on June 14, 15, 16th!

It’s an amazing lineup of work by SFAI filmmakers! For info and tickets: https://www.sfartistsalumni.org/studio8filmfestival

(Posters available at all three screenings, sales support the archives!)

Adaline Kent Exhibition and program at Altman Siegel Gallery June 29th

San Francisco art writer and SFAI alum, Max Blue, along with Jeff Gunderson will be speaking about the legacy, art and amazing life of alumna Adeline Kent (1900-1957) on Saturday afternoon, June 29th in conjunction with the exhibition of her work at the Altman Siegel Gallery in S.F.:
https://altmansiegel.com/news/698-in-conversation-max-blue-and-jeff-gunderson-on/

New Donations

Bruce McGaw (who taught painting at SFAI from 1957-2017, an amazing career that spanned seven different decades!) surprised us with a fantastic donation of posters, fliers, postcards, booklets, and other ephemera announcing exhibitions, poetry readings, film screenings, and other events that he had collected, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, a perfect time capsule of a moment.

Archives Project

As always, we’ve been continuing to work with our interns and volunteers to better organize the archival collections, move them into archivally sound folders and boxes, and create online guides to the collections for researchers.

Our wonderful volunteer and librarian-to-be Megan has been working on the Photography Department collection. She is pictured here with a 1990 petition created by students in the department to protest “frustration and unbearable working conditions with the color processor” … “Each time a print sticks, jams, or crinkles, it necessitates the machine being taken apart, sometimes every ten minutes, and this literally can continue all day.”

Researchers

It’s been such a pleasure to field a steady flow of online and in-person researchers, sending us off in all sorts of directions. Some recent ones…

…a 1978 performance by Gina Pane, which took place at SFAI as part of the Chris Burden-curated exhibition Polar Crossing.

…SFAI student actions in protest of U.S. intervention in Central America and in solidarity with revolutionary moments of the time, including the 1984 SFAI exhibition Artist Call: Against U.S. Intervention in Central America.

…Ceramicist Win Ng’s time at the school. Ng graduated in 1959 (along with a cohort that included Joan Brown, Bernice Bing, and Alvin Light, among others!) and went on to co-found the successful homewares company Tayor & Ng.

…Mark Rothko’s two summers teaching at SFAI.

…and a visit from San Francisco painter and photographer extraordinaire Lenore Chinn, who visited to give us advice for our summer walking tours through the Financial District and Chinatown while also researching her noted uncle, Benjamen Chinn, who studied in the school’s first photography classes with Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Minor White. Lenore was the first to see Ben’s SFAI transcript, which, in addition to the photography classes, lists his classes with Richard Diebenkorn, Jean Varda, Elmer Bischoff, and the first film courses taught by Sidney Peterson. The second issue of Minor White’s aperture magazine included a Benjamen Chinn photograph on its cover from his time in Paris when he studied with Alberto Giacometti and befriended Henri Cartier-Bresson and Fernand Leger. Plus, we learned that Lenore’s painting, Land’s End was just acquired by the Smithsonian, so she will join her Uncle Bennie in the National Gallery Collections.

Other researchers inquired about Jean Varda, Stanley Hayter, Helen Phillips, Sargent Johnson, Morley Baer, Kenneth Anger, 1930s-1960 exhibitions, the 1977 SFAI Annual, and alumni photographer, Barbara Cameron who was one of the founders of the first-ever LGBTQ+ organizations devoted to Native American issues.

Keep the questions coming,
Jeff and Becky

]]><![CDATA[Archive Highlights from 2023]]>Tue, 05 Dec 2023 17:00:00 GMThttps://www.sfailegacyarchive.org/archive-blog/archive-highlights-from-2023Its been a busy few months in the archive! Check out our Winter Newsletter at the link HERE to learn more.

]]><![CDATA[It’s such a thrill...]]>Sat, 11 Nov 2023 00:21:25 GMThttps://www.sfailegacyarchive.org/archive-blog/its-such-a-thrill

...to see our words in print in these two exhibition catalogs–Jeff on the formidable SFAI sculptor Adaline Kent, and Becky on SFAI in the 20s and 30s as it was enriched by students and faculty of diverse backgrounds (particularly artists of Asian descent) that formed San Francisco’s art world at that time.

Stay tuned for Jeff’s talk on Kent at the Treasure Island Museum!

And for the upcoming traveling exhibition, Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Mine Okubo. (Hayakawa and Hibi were both students at SFAI.)

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