San Francisco Art Institute
Historic site · Russian Hill, California
Permanently closed. This page is kept for reference.
A Spanish Colonial Revival campus by Bakewell & Brown, which the school moved into in 1926. A later addition by Paffard Keatinge-Clay brought 22,500 square feet of studio space, a theater and lecture hall, galleries, a cafe, and an outdoor amphitheatre formed by the stepped roof of the lecture hall. It is San Francisco Landmark No. 85, designated in 1977, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 15000950. No source states opening hours for the campus.
History
The school began in 1871 as the San Francisco Art Association, became the California School of Fine Arts in 1916 and took the name San Francisco Art Institute in 1961. Diego Rivera painted The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City on the campus in 1931; the fresco itself is San Francisco Landmark No. 294, designated in 2021, which is an unusual thing for a city to designate. In January 2021 the trustees proposed selling the fresco to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art and dropped the plan after objections. The school closed in July 2022, taking the Diego Rivera Gallery that housed the work with it, and filed for Chapter 7 liquidation on 26 April 2023. In late February 2024 a nonprofit backed by Laurene Powell Jobs bought the campus, fresco included, for about 30 million dollars.
Visit
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133
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