Our Mission
The SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive (SFAI LF+A) is an independent non-profit formed to protect, sustain, and carry into the future the legacy of the San Francisco Art Institute–a legacy of bold, experimental artistic practice and innovative scholarly inquiry. The Foundation preserves and makes accessible to scholars and artists the SFAI archives, an unparalleled collection of primary source material documenting the history of SFAI and the art of Northern California dating back to 1871. The SFAI LF+A offers original public programming and publications, organizes exhibitions, and continues to build SFAI's reputation as a cultural force in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
People
Charles DeSantis
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Gale Elston
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Katie Hood Morgan
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Becky Alexander, Archivist
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Jeff Gunderson, Archivist
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Staff and Board Bios
Becky Alexander (Archivist, SFAI LF+A) worked in the SFAI Library and Archives from 2005 through 2022 and has a deep affection for the school and all the amazing, weird, creative people who made it what it was, both in its recent past and throughout its long, colorful history. She is grateful to have the opportunity to preserve and share the SFAI Archives with the wider world. Becky's writing on SFAI's history (such as painter Joan Brown's open water swimming practice and the ghost that haunts SFAI's bell-less bell tower) can be found in the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive's online exhibition, Orbits of Known and Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories/Matrix 277.
Charles DeSantis (Foundation President and Board Chair, SFAI LF+A) is heavily committed to giving back to the humanitarian sector and serving children and refugees in the greatest need worldwide. He started two art education programs–Art in Kibera and Kibera Art Institute–serving AIDS-impacted youth in the Kibera Slum (Nairobi, Kenya) ages 4 to 22 giving a voice and identity through the visual arts. The Nairobi National Museum (Kenya’s Smithsonian) hosted a two-month long exhibit of The Art of the Smart, Beautiful and Important Children of Kibera in October 2018. Charles has served on many boards worldwide such as Nyumbani USA, School of Hope Foundation, and he is Chair Emeritus of the US Association for UNHCR (UN refugee organization). Charles continues his commitment to the arts through organization boards such as The Washington Ballet, Sitar Art Center.
Charles is an artist and a senior leader and received his bachelor’s degree from Saint Mary’s College of California in Art Practice and his post-baccalaureate from the San Francisco Art Institute in Painting under the mentorship of Dewey Crumpler. Additionally, Charles has extensive graduate education from Georgetown University and serves as the Associate Vice President and Chief Benefits Officer of Georgetown University. Charles lives in Washington, D.C., with his husband David McDermott and their children, Lucas, Andre, Jasmine and Lilly. He has published two books with New Academia Publishing: Smart, Beautiful and Important: teaching art to AIDS-affected orphans in Africa’s Largest slum and Lucas and Lilly go to Kindergarten.
Gale P. Elston (Board Secretary, SFAI LF+A) is an Art Law attorney, who has represented artists, art institutes, and non-profits for over thirty years as an advocate for artists’ rights. She has served on the board of numerous art non-profits, including Faith Ringgold’s Any Child Can Fly Foundation as well as serving as a Trustee of the Headlands Center for the Arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a founding board member of the alternative, non-profit cultural space Whitebox in New York City and served on the Board for ten years before becoming Executive Director. Gale Elston operated an art gallery in the East Village of New York in the 1980’s, and she briefly operated an experimental art space in in San Francisco “Ore Projektz” at Greenwich and Jensen Streets.
Gale currently sits on the Board of the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation which supports artists and musicians. Current projects include building a chapel for artwork of Carolee Schneemann in Italy and a book on art law. Three of the cases brought by Gale Elston for artists are featured in the Art Law Handbook, including a VARA-based (Visual Artists Rights Act) case which established new law for artists. She has litigated many VARA cases in the Federal Southern District Court of New York and has lectured on copyright law for schools and panels. She recently chaired a panel for CAA on NFTs and Art.
Jeff Gunderson (Archivist, SFAI LF+A) has been the Librarian and Archivist at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1981, has written on the history of California photography, the San Francisco art scene of the 1940s, and most recently on “Adaline Kent: Communities & Comraderies, 1920s-1950s,” an essay for the retrospective exhibition catalog, Adaline Kent: Click of Authenticity (Rizzoli: 2023) as well as “The Education of Ed Hardy,” published for the De Young Museum’s Ed Hardy Deeper than Skin: The Art of the New Tattoo (Rizzoli, 2019). He has done presentations on artists Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Ed Ruscha, Charles Howard, the history of Bay Area conceptual art, the influence of art libraries on artists and, with Jim Van Buskirk, the history of SF’s LGBTQ art scene. He also wrote the introductory essay to Black Power/Flower Power: Photographs by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch.
In the last few years, he has fallen down the rabbit hole of exhibitions as a collaborator on the 2019 San Francisco Art Institute exhibition Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics and Black Futures as well as an editor/collaborator on the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives 2020 online exhibition Orbits of Known and Unknown Objects: SFAI Histories, Matrix 277. Jeff is currently working on a collection of essays about open water swimming.
Katie Hood Morgan (Board Treasurer, SFAI LF+A) is Interim Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the CUNY Hunter College Art Galleries in New York. Recent projects include commissioned exhibitions for the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Katie worked at San Francisco Art Institute in various curatorial roles over the period of a decade, including that of Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs. Other recent roles include: Program Director of FOR-SITE Foundation, Assistant Curator at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and Director and Curator of the Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, all in San Francisco, CA. She has organized major exhibitions and public programs with artists and collectives including Ai Weiwei, Patti Smith, Jill Magid, Alicia McCarthy, Postcommodity, and Bill Fontana, among many others.
Katie recently oversaw the critically-acclaimed touring exhibitions Carlos Villa: Worlds in Collision (for SFAI), the first-ever major museum retrospective for a Filipino-American artist, and the 26-artist exhibition Dust Specks on the Sea: Sculpture from the French Caribbean and Haiti (for Hunter College). She has contributed curatorial projects and programming at institutions and organizations including the Oakland Museum of California; the de Young Museum; California College of the Arts; SFMOMA; and MASS MoCA. She has participated in presentations, juries, and studio critiques with Creative Capital, NARS Foundation, Hunter College, the Wassaic Project, School of Visual Arts, New York, and ACRE Residency, Wisconsin. Katie earned her BFA in History of Art and Visual Culture at University of California-Santa Cruz, and her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. In addition to her work as a founding board member of SFAI LF+A, she sits on the Advisory Board for Cycladic Arts, an artist-run gallery and residency in Paros, Greece. She lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
A Brief History of SFAI LF+A
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July 2022: The SFAI Foundation working group convenes as an informal cohort of SFAI community members exploring possibilities around starting an independent nonprofit to preserve SFAI’s physical and digital archives. August 2022: SFAI LF+A is officially formed as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with founding board members Charles DeSantis, Gale Elston, and Katie Hood Morgan. November 2022: SFAI LF+A is officially granted possession of the SFAI archives by the current SFAI board. February 2023: Our virtual home and fundraising platform–sfailegacyarchive.org–goes live to share the story of the archives and reach SFAI community members around the world Image: CSFA students drawing in the tower, ca. 1928. |
About the Logo
The font used in our logo–"Kuchar"–was created by SFAI students in their Spring 2012 SFAI typography class with professor JD Beltran. Students: Cory Bates, Tyler Cross, Michael Figge, Erin Hall, Elise Inferrera, Antonia Kimatian, Roman Koval, Joey Kuo, Riho Kurematsu, Noell Nelson, Kelly Nettles, Kegan Snyder, and Dayna Rochelle Stanley.
Kuchar is based on legendary filmmaker and SFAI professor George Kuchar’s handwriting found on the labels of his VHS and Mini-DV tapes in the SFAI Archives. Kuchar taught at SFAI from 1971 until his death in 2011.
Kuchar is based on legendary filmmaker and SFAI professor George Kuchar’s handwriting found on the labels of his VHS and Mini-DV tapes in the SFAI Archives. Kuchar taught at SFAI from 1971 until his death in 2011.
Header Image: Poster for California School of Fine Arts. Collection SFAI Legacy Archive + Foundation.