The death knell of arts education in the Bay Area has been ringing over the past few years — but that might be changing.
A handful of artists with deep ties to the recently shuttered San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts are reimagining how the future of arts education could look in The City. It’s inclusive, diverse and decidedly do-it-yourself.
Two new programs — one in the West Marin headlands and another in the Mission district — are showing the way for artist-led educational initiatives. One foregrounds making art, while the other puts an emphasis on arts education itself. Together, the two fill a critical absence in the Bay Area’s arts landscape.
Early in the summer, artists Lindsey White and Jon Rubin co-facilitated Present Company, an “experiment in arts education” at the Headlands Center for the Arts in West Marin. It was free to attend, and participants received a transportation stipend.
There were two unique requirements for applicants: an openness to uncertainty and a sense of humor.
“It was compelling to us to create something that we hadn’t quite defined before it happened,” Rubin said.
The program consisted of 11 Bay Area artists, ages 27 to 65, selected from 250 applicants. In an expanded exercise in arts education, it included group dinners, hikes with birders and herbalists, karaoke parties, tarot readings, group weaving projects, and field trips throughout the greater Bay Area.
Rubin — a professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art in Pittsburgh — previously lived in the Bay Area. He taught as an adjunct professor at SFAI and CCA, where he received his Master of Fine Arts degree, and was one of White’s professors.
In the early 2000s, he ran Independent School of Art, a nomadic, barter-based art school and the spiritual predecessor to Present Company.
“Learning is something that happens best when you primarily recognize each other’s presence as the main element of the curriculum,” Rubin said.
“That ethos has been difficult to maintain at my current job, which is a highly institutionalized environment, even though it’s full of amazing people,” he said. “It doesn’t always mirror the way most artists move in the world.”
White graduated from the MFA program at CCA in 2007 and was an assistant professor at SFAI from 2010 to 2022. Following the school’s closure, she taught at the Art Institute of Chicago, before leaving academia altogether and returning to San Francisco.
“Being inside a school falling apart can be pretty traumatizing, but I still really believe in arts education,” White said of her experience at SFAI. “Present Company has been a chance to move on from that kind of intuitional collapse — even with a small budget to make it happen, which is what artists do every day.”
San Francisco Art Institute closed in 2022. After ups and downs, California College of the Arts announced earlier this year its imminent closure and big-tech buyout. The closure of CCA will leave Northern California without an art school, at least in the traditional sense.
It's a national phenomenon. Memphis College of Art closed in 2020, and both Delaware College of Art and Design and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia closed in 2024, to name just a few. And it’s a trend that might well continue.
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“In the next one to five years we’re going to see a lot of art schools close,” Rubin said. “A lot of artists, myself included, have art careers because of jobs in academia. There’s no way that I would be continuing to make art otherwise.”
In the coming months, Southern Exposure, a storied Mission arts nonprofit, will launch two education programs — the Emerging Curator’s Lab and Night School.
“As traditional pathways such as art schools and curatorial training programs become less accessible, nonprofit arts organizations are increasingly called upon to provide professional development opportunities,” Southern Exposure said in its announcement of the programs.
The Emerging Curator’s Lab, beginning next month, is a two-year professional development and mentorship program. It reimagines Southern Exposure’s historic Curatorial Council, the nonprofit's community-led exhibition program, to provide curatorial education to people from diverse backgrounds.
“It’s aimed at bypassing the colonial aspect of working at museums and the restrictions of who gets to curate and who has access to curatorial programs — or even art school in the first place,” said Southern Exposure Executive Director Julio Cesar Morales.
Students, who are invited to participate, will receive a stipend for the two-year program, which Morales conceives of as “a kind of technical school.”
“With this knowledge, you can become a curator, a social-justice leader, or several other paths,” he said.
The group, which will be co-led by Morales and Matthew Villar Miranda, will meet virtually, as its students are local to both the Bay Area and other U.S. cities. Teachers include arts professionals from the Tate Modern in London, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Night School, launching in January, is focused on giving artists tools to allow them to become educators. Each cohort will include one teaching artist and six emerging artists, who will develop their artistic practices into accessible and innovative lesson plans.
The 12-week program, which is also free and provides a stipend, will culminate in public-facing programs including exhibitions and workshops. The cohort will also create curricula for Southern Exposure’s youth-education program and for the San Francisco Unified School District.
“I come from that trajectory of being an emerging artist and learning to teach and creating my own economy,” said Morales, who graduated from SFAI in 1996 and taught at both SFAI and CCA.
“I think Present Company is just one piece of other educational projects that artists could lead,” White said. “I think a lot of times, artists get overlooked as leaders in their communities.”
It’s these sorts of experimental educational programs that will help retain and nurture the artistic community in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, three artist-in-residency programs emerged on The City’s waterfront.
Now, artists themselves are taking charge of their educational models. The art schools might be closing, but the spirit of experimentation and shared knowledge they fostered can live on. While we are witnessing the collapse of the arts-education infrastructure, something new and vital is emerging from the ashes.
“It’s really important to keep our artists in the Bay Area,” Morales said. “One word to describe the history of art in this region is ‘experimentation.’ Without the access or ability to experiment, our artists are going to leave.”
Max Blue is The Examiner’s art critic. His State of the Arts column appears monthly.