Updates from the SFAI Archives: Late Spring Edition!

The 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…

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​…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

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