Parade of Shadows: Archiving the End of the San Francisco Art Institute

Words by Becky Alexander

If it’s possible for an institution to die, the San Francisco Art Institute died on July 12, 2022, when it graduated its last seven Bachelors and Masters of Fine Arts: Bells Howard, Drew Hardgrove, Eliseo Silva, Olivia Dorrance, Yoonjae Cho, Yaxi Wang, and Naomi Alessandra. 

After that, the life went out of the place in some unquantifiable way, and also very literally: the living, breathing people that had filled the school’s classrooms and halls with the force of their energy and ideas walked out the door and didn’t come back. The turtles living in the increasingly overgrown fountain continued to be fed by the security guards until a thoughtful former faculty member stopped by to scoop them up and take them to a reptile rescue in Marin County. She sent around photos of them hanging out in their new kiddie pool up north, a pair of reptile retirees. Empty, that building, like every building, revealed itself for what it was: fundamentally just a shell–the home for something–or nothing. 

SFAI was over, but it wasn’t quite over, because instead of calling it quits, the school’s leadership kept looking for a path forward, no matter how tenuous. Could they sell or rent one part of the campus and continue the school in another? Could they sell the enormous Diego Rivera fresco that covered one wall of the student gallery, most recently appraised at 50 million dollars, despite the fact that moving it would mean moving an enormous wall out from inside the building?

Despite many close calls over the years and decades, the school had always pulled through, so couldn’t it squeak past disaster one more time? 

With that question hanging with ever-increasing heaviness in the air, the place seemed, bit by bit, to be folding in on itself and shutting down. The heat was turned off. Half of the bathrooms didn’t work. One day the phones could make calls and the next day they couldn’t. Eventually the internet vanished back into the ether it came from. Each time something stopped working it happened without warning, because rather than proactively cancelling accounts, the school had simply stopped paying the bills, letting each service blink off one by one.

Covers of SFAI catalogs and student publications, courtesy of the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive

I experienced all of this first-hand because, along with the security guards and a few very occasional employees who did things like restock the toilet paper, take out the trash, and now and then tour around potential building buyers, my coworker Jeff and I remained “on the staff” through this strange time–if you can be considered staff when you’re not getting paid to be there, but you keep showing up anyway (which, of course, you can’t, and shouldn’t–jobs are for making money, one hopes!). 

Jeff and I had been working in the SFAI library and archives for a total of nearly six decades between us–he had started there in 1981, the year I was born, and I had started in 2005, just a year out of college.  Most of our time was spent supporting students and classes, but the archival collections had always been a compelling side project. The SFAI archives are full of capital “H” History (first art school west of the Mississippi; a groundbreaking photography department founded by Ansel Adams; luminaries like Angela Davis, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still on the faculty; the nexus of various large developments in art on the West Coast like WPA-era muralism, Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Funk and Beat-era art, and so on). But equally compellingly, they are also full of fun, weird stuff that is reflective of the fun, weird kind of place SFAI was. 

Cover of a course catalog for evening and Saturday classes in Spring 1969.

Course description of Bruce Conner’s undergraduate seminar at SFAI in 1966.

The archives has a file on the ghost(s) haunting the school’s central bell-less bell tower that includes audio recordings made by a team of ghost hunters, invitations to a Halloween party featuring a medium, and ghost sighting report forms filled out by students. A “dogs on campus” file features a string of 1970s-era memos from then-Dean Fred Martin as he struggled to reign in the increasingly out-of-control problem of students’ dogs roaming the building in packs, unsupervised and not well cleaned up after by their owners. The collection also includes various interesting objects, like the folding chair that John Cage happened to sit in when he performed on campus, lovingly affixed with a metal plaque by a student to commemorate the occasion, or the ashes of photography department faculty member Jerry Burchard, baked into small ceramic buddhas by Richard Shaw, a member of the ceramics department, and handed out at his memorial service wrapped in fabric reminiscent of the Hawaiian shirts he had loved to wear. It’s an interesting collection because it documents an interesting place, and because it was shaped over time by the collecting impulses of interesting people. 

Ghost tour request from Stephen Goldstein, president of SFAI, for Wally Hedrick’s  class in 1978. 

San Francisco Chronicle article, published in 1976, about the infamous SFAI ghost.

In the spring of 2022, the school’s final year, when Jeff and I were the only two remaining staff members in the library, we received word that a grant application we had submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which proposed holistic processing and description of the school’s archival collections, had been accepted. And so, when SFAI finally announced its impending closure, we found ourselves left with $234,000 earmarked for a project to preserve the history of the school–a goal that was surely more urgent now than ever–and only the dying remains of an institution left to receive it. To us this seemed like the glimmer of something possible in an impossible situation. 

It felt like a critical juncture, filled with urgency. Yet eight months passed between SFAI’s final graduation and the establishment of the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive as an independent nonprofit 501(c)3 capable of receiving the NEH funding, with space secured for the archives and Jeff and me on the payroll. They were a strange eight months. We were theoretically preparing the archives to move offsite, a large and time-sensitive project that might need to happen at any moment since the school always seemed on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and we were trying to get everything out before that happened. The situation seemed to demand immediate action. And yet we were also unemployed, had nowhere to move the collection and no money with which to pay rent on a new space, a condition that seemed to demand inaction.

We were simultaneously on a mission and at loose ends–unemployed, volunteer, librarian-turned-archivists in a cold, empty, leaky building, haunting the place alongside whatever ghosts were already on the job, poking around storage closets and empty offices for more material that we felt belonged in the archives as a permanent record of the school and its history.

It was an eerie project. The building had been vacated more or less Pompeii-style–everyone had lost their jobs but nothing had been wrapped up, so offices sat empty, as if we had all left for lunch and never came back. 

Jeff and I made the rounds. We spent one afternoon in the storage loft above the mailroom. We couldn’t get the lights to work, so we peered into boxes by the light of our phone flashlights, striking gold when we found the binders full of 90s-era slide documentation of a whole bunch of SFAI gallery exhibitions. The lights weren’t working in Studio 8 either, the film studio where beloved faculty member George Kuchar’s classes used to throw together campy, wild, extremely low-budget films every semester, pulling rubber masks and wigs and plastic toys from piles of junk in the prop closet. I was hoping to find the large, foam and rubber alien that had appeared in George’s film for decades, and searched through the prop closet, coming up empty handed before finally spotting it splayed out on the floor in one dark corner of the big empty studio. 

Slides documenting SFAI gallery exhibitions from the 1990s.

More slides documenting SFAI gallery exhibitions from the 1990s.

Rubber alien used in many of George Kuchar’s films navigating the SFAI Archives Org Chart on a Toshiba T4800CT laptop. The chart reads, “The Alien is in charge.” 

It felt like something between the experience of going through a loved one’s belongings after their death and that of packing up your desk after you’ve been let go from the job you hoped never to leave. In other words, it was both depressing and meaningful. It felt special to have the run of that place before it was gone for good, and I didn’t take that for granted. But it was also cold and strange, and every inch of it felt infused with loss.

As an archivist, there is a lot I would have done differently if I had it to do over. There were passwords and hard drives I would have asked for when the right people still remembered the right things and were around to ask. And I would have undertaken a more methodical, considered transfer of digitized and born-digital material between cloud storage accounts if I had known what a trainwreck that process would be. But hindsight is as always 20-20, and we did our best under strange, difficult, and unprecedented circumstances. Jeff and I became full-time archivists overnight, leaving behind the concerns of keeping an academic art library up and running, in favor of the new set of unanticipated problems, challenges and opportunities to be found in the project of creating and running a small, independent archive documenting the history of a closed art school. I found it hard to think myself into that new reality during those months of wandering around in empty offices grabbing boxes, and overall I think we did okay with what we found and what we brought. 

Arriving in the new archives space.

In the end everything came together at once: finding the right space to rent, having the money to pay for it for a while thanks to a huge fundraiser thrown by SFAI alumni, and learning that it was time to clear out of the building–SFAI was about to declare bankruptcy. An amazing group of librarians and our other organizationally-minded friends came over for packing parties in those last few weeks. We pushed hard, the movers came, and all those boxes headed out the door, to their new home in the SFAI Archive, where they, and we, have been ever since.

Archivists Becky Alexander and Jeff Gunderson, in the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive on Hawthorne Street.

As is so often the case for human beings (particularly artists!), the death of SFAI has generated a type of attention that the school would have loved to have while alive, including from news outlets and museums. An SFAI-themed exhibition is currently on view at SFMOMA through July 2026, curated from work in the museum’s permanent collection by SFAI-affiliated artists, with vitrines in each gallery full of material from the archives. This has been gratifying on many levels. From the perspective of the archives, it’s great publicity, which is helpful from a practical, fundraising standpoint, because the archives itself has of course become a new precarious organization for me and Jeff to lose sleep over (drat!). The tail end of the NEH grant that gave our project life in the first place was recently cancelled, along with so many others all across the country, by the current presidential administration, which in a shockingly short amount of time has already implemented so many acts of cultural, artistic, and community erasure. Witnessing this while working to establish a small nonprofit has been eye-opening about what it takes for this sort of operation to exist in the world. 

Installation image of SFMOMA exhibition, People Make This Place: SFAI Stories, on view July 26th 2025-July 5th, 2026.

Installation image of SFMOMA exhibition of archival photos, documents, and ephemera focused on the work of filmmaker George Kuchar.

And of course it has been a thrill to see material from the SFAI archives get the museum treatment–in particular the care and attention of thoughtful, skilled, meticulous conservators. One of the archival objects that made it into the exhibition is the motorcycle vest hand-sewn by sculpture faculty member Richard Berger, with a design patterned after the logo of the Hell’s Angels (although not a Hell’s Angel himself, Richard was known to ride with them). In place of their name he embroidered the vest with the name of the school–in his mind its own gang of a sort. The SFMOMA conservators carefully and invisibly repaired and reinforced the vest’s worn leather, and hung it beautifully, allowing it to drape gracefully in a custom display case.

Detail image of Richard Berger’s vest, displayed in the SFMOMA exhibition.

Richard was a sculptor whose perspective always held a particular preoccupation with loss. His childhood was marked by a tragic plane crash above his middle school’s athletic field that injured him and killed seven of his classmates, and later in his life a motorcycle accident caused the loss of the lower part of one leg, events that surely shaped him as an artist. Absence infused Richard’s artwork; one of his pieces inscribed the form of a couch in the air, its topography mapped out with hundreds of weights hanging from strings. Another, his 1997 work All I Didn’t Say to Charlie Sexton, Last I saw Him, titled for Charles Sexton, an SFAI student who was dying of AIDS at the time, is made up of phrases inscribed on transparent disks that rotate through and past each other, specific things he wished he could have and would have said to Charlie in their last interaction.

All of this comes to mind reading something Richard once wrote about SFAI: 

This is the place that people are drawn to because of what is both indelible and diffuse about its being, the sense that dreaming happens here and that it has left its traces in the same way that a parade of shadows animates a place by making all of its past a presence, an immediacy. That presence was never the intention of any of the many contributors to its being, yet they all dreamed here. 

Is it really true that the building is nothing without its people? No, it can’t be true. Something is left behind: the parade of shadows across its walls must animate that hallowed ground. How could it not? 800 Chestnut Street had the good fortune of being purchased out of bankruptcy by a nonprofit with plans to reopen it as a new art center. Walk inside that building sometime once it’s open again and find out–I believe that you’ll still feel it. 

Back across town in the basement on Hawthorne Street, my favorite compliment to receive comes from the visitors who say that the archive feels like the school in some way–that it gives off an SFAI vibe. My professional responsibility as an archivist is to the material and its longevity and accessibility to the recorders of history, but in my heart what I want most of all is to hold onto the feeling of SFAI in that space somehow, to the extent that this is possible in what is essentially a room full of boxes. On the other hand, I bristle whenever someone says that the school is somehow “living on” through the archives, because it isn’t–not any more than the shadow a person casts on a wall can serve as a stand-in for the lifeblood and energy of the person who casts it. 

Richard Berger was an artist, reflecting on SFAI at a time when it was alive and well, and yet to me his parade of shadows prematurely embodies the elegiac perspective of an archivist. Dreaming as an artist is about reaching forward and conjuring something brand new into being. Dreaming as an archivist is generative as well, but it’s a project of memory and reflection, a looking back to look forward. It is a chance to “make the past a presence,” as Richard says, by shining light on all the people who made a place what it was, in order to better see the outlines of their shadows. Witnessing the school’s death has felt like standing with one foot on each side of this divide, with the artists on one side and the archivists on the other. I turn one way and see SFAI as it was (alive!), and the other to see it as it is now–held in boxes full of papers and that flickering parade of shadows across those familiar concrete walls.  

Pages from SFAI catalogs and student publications, courtesy of the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive

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