San Francisco Art Institute Expected to Close After Spring 2020 Semester
“faculty and staff were told to anticipate mass layoffs”
The school was already having issues, but the Coronavirus crisis was the final blow.
The Architect’s Newspaper reports:
The San Francisco Art Institute expected to close permanently
The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)—one of the oldest art schools in the country and the alma mater of greats including Catherine Opie, Kehinde Wiley, and Annie Leibovitz—announced this week in an email that it will close permanently at the end of the spring semester unless it can establish a strategic partnership with a larger institution within the next few months. While virtual education classes for currently-enrolled students will continue unabated until the spring, at which point graduating students will receive their degrees, the San Francisco-based school is no longer accepting students in the fall, and faculty and staff were told to anticipate mass layoffs.
The email, cosigned by the school president Gordon Knox and board of trustees chair Pam Rorke Levy, cited the spread of the novel coronavirus as the principal factor in the school’s decision to shutter its doors after its 149-year run. “Given our current financial situation, and what we expect to be a precipitous decline in enrollment due to the pandemic,” the email reads, “we are now considering the suspension of our regular courses and degree programs starting immediately after graduation in May of this year.”
Yet the pandemic is only the latest element in a string of financial setbacks the school has recently faced. In 2017, while enrollment had been on a steady decline with few signs of improving, the school purchased a historic U.S. Army warehouse at Fort Mason and commissioned local firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects to adaptively reuse it into its new campus. This and other recent investments, according to the New York Times, have left the school with an estimated debt of $19 million that would only increase if the school attempted to continue operations.
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Comments
In terms of an art school, this is a great loss, they have brought a lot of beauty into the world.
In terms of San Francisco? Tough shit. What goes around comes around.
I’m very open to permanently closing down the entire Bay Area. As Nancy Pelosi insufferably reminds us, “Let’s do it for the children.”