https://huntercollegeartgalleries.org/
In 1926, an American-born teacher named Ruth Faison Shaw invented the concept of finger painting while running a school for children in Rome. One day, a young student scratched his finger, so Shaw instructed him to visit the bathroom and dip the cut in iodine. When the student didn’t return, Shaw discovered him in the bathroom, having smeared the purple antiseptic all over its walls. Shaw recognized the pure, tactile expressivity of the gesture, unfettered by pencil and brush and the fine motor skills those implements require. After months of research and testing, she developed recipes for nontoxic, water-based paints, and then provided a basic demonstration to the students, who were “immediately delighted,” as Shaw recalled in her 1934 book Finger Painting: A Perfect Medium for Self-Expression.1 “The role of the teacher,” Shaw came to realize, “is principally that of a quiet reassuring presence.”2
The artist Brian Belott told this story gleefully during a lecture that he and the educator Jennifer DiGioia delivered on Rhoda Kellogg, an educator, activist, and advocate of early-childhood artmaking. Programmed by Lindsey White for her group exhibition and program series “Last Art School” at New York’s Hunter College Art Galleries, the lecture, “Whole Palm Spread,” made the case for a totally nondidactic approach to arts education. As Belott and DiGioia explained, Kellogg designed special chairs to support the posture of her preschool students and insisted windows were high enough on classroom walls to not proffer distraction. Like Shaw, she objected to evaluation of any kind.
In her lifetime, Kellogg collected over two million artworks made by children, both in her hometown of San Francisco and from her travels around the world. In “Last Art School,” a grid of over fifty finger paintings from the Rhoda Kellogg Children’s Art Collection covers a wall at Hunter’s 205 Hudson gallery space. Two long wooden benches are placed back-to-back in the middle of the room. On the backrest of one, a small metal plaque reads, in all-capital letters, “YOUR FEAR OF LOOKING STUPID IS HOLDING YOU BACK.” It’s one among many moments in the exhibition that take up the mantle of Shaw and Kellogg’s free-expression philosophies towards arts education. Invited as this year’s Arthur & Carol Goldberg Visiting Curator and Artist in Residence at Hunter, White decided to mount an exhibition and series of programs that stage an expansive inquiry into the current, troubled state of art schools, and the ongoing search for alternatives to these institutions.
White taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over a decade, joining its photography department as an adjunct professor in 2010. She then became an assistant, and later associate, professor, before being appointed chair of the department in 2015, a role she served in until the school’s closure in 2022. After 151 years of continuous operation, SFAI didn’t go down easily. Shuttering slowly after years on the brink, the school feigned recovery, courting mergers with other institutions only to publicly announce its demise multiple times. SFAI bled and bled and bled, leaving its students, faculty members, alumni, and many artists in San Francisco who felt anchored by its presence to witness, powerlessly, a halting and spastic death.
After the school’s closure, White was offered a tenured position at the Art Institute of Chicago, which, with an annual tuition of $54,530, is one of the most expensive art schools in the country. After one year, White walked away from the institution and from academia altogether. The word she uses—to quote the exhibition’s accompanying text—is “abandoned.” “Last Art School” emerged as White’s “appeal for a collective re-visioning of art education.”
Making art has been in a productive tension with its instruction for decades, if not forever. This conflict has spurred countless critiques of, and experiments within, arts education that all reject traditional academe, such as “counter-education” manifestos, free universities, radical pedagogic discourse that seeks to dismantle teacher-student hierarchies, and declarations from artist-educators such as Corita Kent or Joseph Beuys that “everyone is an artist.” But the contemporary precarity of higher education now makes this productive testing of art school’s limitations next to impossible. Institutions have become increasingly helpless within the economic systems to which they’re bound. Since “Last Art School” opened in late August, White has been printing out articles to share with interested visitors about higher education’s demise; these have accrued into a depressing stack that gains about three inches a month. “‘Last Art School’ isn’t about any particular place,” White told me during my visit to the exhibition, “but SFAI was the last art school.”
White contributed several works to “Last Art School,” and her three-channel video work Closed for Business (2023/25), which plays on loop in its own room at the gallery, functions as a sort of elegy for the shuttered institution. Not long after SFAI’s campus had been permanently closed to its students, White snuck back onto the grounds, filming her footpath. The camera moves through the campus’s empty rooms at a remove, mimicking the style of virtual real estate walkthroughs that became ubiquitous during the pandemic and have remained widespread ever since. Eschewing affect, White’s footage is distant and impersonal, as if she’s performing taxidermy on the building, pulling out the intestines of a carcass and petrifying its insides with her camera’s chemical gaze. The school’s once-warm, organic center—its true value—has been drained from its lifeless corpse. “Up until [SFAI’s] last moments, it was full of people who really wanted to be artists,” White recalled. “I try not to be sentimental about it. I loved it, but I know it’s over.” Without its students, the building is just a building.
In many ways, White made “Last Art School” in response to that hollowed-out institution. The exhibition ports the feeling of her time at SFAI and the work of many former students and faculty members into Hunter’s gallery spaces, indulging in the fantasy of an art school that is no longer subject to enrollment metrics, asset management, and real-estate value.
Several of the artists that White included in “Last Art School” also walked away from tenured positions as art professors—such as Sandra Ono, who left Mills College, and Whitney Hubbs, who left Alfred University. Others are former students and faculty from SFAI and members of White’s larger community in San Francisco. Many of the pieces curated into “Last Art Show” are buttressed by components built by White, lending an architecture of support. Most notably, she converted part of 205 Hudson's lower galleries into a retro-styled diner dubbed “Chat & Chew,” named after a diner that once operated in San Francisco's Mission District.
In an interview with Food & Wine, the director David Lynch said that a “poet could write volumes about diners, because they’re so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses.”3 For “Last Art School,” White blurred the lines between curating and waitressing; the artist served drinks on the exhibition’s opening night and provides free lunch to visitors once a week for the show’s duration. Hot coffee is always available during open hours. Alongside curatorial fellows Andee Berberich and Rebecca Miralrio, White has hosted a suite of themed lunches and artist lectures, as well as a ventriloquist act and a talent show. “It’s important to host,” White told me, while changing out the thematic placemats she designs for each week of the exhibition. It’s not food as art as gimmick, in the tradition of New York’s conceptual artists, but food as food as food, in the spirit of generosity and comfort.
Four paintings by the artist and former SFAI professor Dewey Crumpler hang atop the fake river rock walls of the “Chat & Chew” installation, which White and the San Francisco–based artist Nicole Hayden painted in mottled shades of brown. In Crumpler’s small, oval-shaped composition Instruction #6 (2023), an outstretched arm covered by a gray sweatshirt sleeve wipes a blackboard clean. Honoré de Balzac opens his serial novel Lost Illusions (1837–1843) with a description of printing press attendants walking back and forth between inked plates and the press’s machinery. There’s something of that in Crumpler’s work, as his ghostly educator wipes the board in perpetuity, lines of motion undulating along the sleeve of the figure’s hoodie.
In the gallery’s back room, White placed three plush beach balls, which she had fashioned out of multicolored gingham fabrics, onto a narrow bed covered in a red buffalo plaid blanket. While giving me a tour of the show in early November, she collapsed into its wire frame, explaining that she devised these furnishings as a place for visitors to recline while taking in the archival materials installed on the surrounding walls. Clippings and photographs culled from the SFAI Legacy Foundation + Archive hang beneath yellow and red lacquered wooden signs hand-painted by the artist Caitlyn Galloway, which display thematic categories such as “THE FUTURE” and “$$.” “The problem with archives,” she told me, “is that nobody wants to read that much. I wanted to give people a place to start, like, ‘oh, I’m interested in money, or blood.’”
A black-and-white photograph pinned to the wall under the “GREATEST OF ALL TIME” plaque shows a plaster wall mostly eclipsing Jay DeFeo’s monumental painting The Rose (1958–66). The work consisted of over two thousand pounds of paint that the San Francisco–based artist spent almost a decade layering into a dense relief. In 1965, DeFeo was evicted from her home and studio and was forced to find new homes for her work—and for herself. The Rose was briefly exhibited in a gallery at SFAI and then stashed in one of the school’s conference rooms. Not long after, DeFeo, the artist Bruce Conner, and other observers soon flagged conservation concerns. In an economical effort to halt its degradation, the school built a three-quarter partition wall in front of the painting, which they could not afford to move. Seminars and faculty meetings carried on alongside DeFeo’s hidden magnum opus for decades, until David A. Ross, a former SFAI faculty member and subsequent director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, became the director of the Whitney Museum. He decided to acquire The Rose, and the institution then facilitated its excavation and transport.
“Last Art School” features another massive work by an Oakland-based painter: an untitled mural by Alicia McCarthy too tall to fit on any of the gallery walls in one piece. Consequently, White and McCarthy agreed to display the work in two segments, with the lower half jutting out from the wall at a near-forty-five-degree angle, supported by a makeshift wedge. Originally commissioned in 2017 for the opening of SFAI’s short-lived, and—due to their already impending financial collapse—extremely ill-advised second campus at Fort Mason, McCarthy’s painting was the final object to be removed from SFAI’s campus after the school’s declaration of bankruptcy. McCarthy, an SFAI alumna and member of San Francisco’s Mission School movement, still lives in Oakland and has a reputation for supporting promising young artists by hiring them as assistants. In “Last Art School,” a framed page from McCarthy’s legal disagreement with the bankruptcy court—which tried to seize her painting when SFAI claimed it as an asset in its filing—hangs to the left of the work.
While McCarthy managed to save her work from bankruptcy court, the school’s debt did mean that Diego Rivera’s historic 1931 mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, valued at $50 million, was set to be carved out of the campus gallery’s wall and sold at auction. White included Mario Ayala’s 2021 painting Reunion, which partially reproduces the historic mural’s New Deal–era panels depicting laborers constructing civic infrastructure. Casting himself in the center of these panels, Ayala paints himself gradually transforming into a cockroach in a style inspired by the covers of the young-adult science fiction book series Animorphs. Made as a tribute to SFAI, with the word ALUMNUS emblazoned in gold across the top, the artist honors Rivera while perhaps suggesting, with no disrespect to the cockroach, a downward trajectory in American institutions.
Around the time of the potential Rivera sale, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman purchased a $27 million dollar house across the street from SFAI’s campus, later telling a reporter that a coyote had taken a liking to his deck furniture. Even worse than the city’s tech oligarchs taking no interest in supporting the arts is what happens when they do. This was the school’s eventual fate. In early 2024, Lauren Powell-Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, purchased SFAI’s campus and its Rivera mural for $30 million, with vague “creative” intentions. As it stands, the building is set to be the new home of “California Academy of Studio Arts,” a privately funded nonprofit art center. Aaron Peskin, the district’s city council member, claimed to have cried “tears of joy” at the idea of “an arts institution at 800 Chestnut Street.”4 But the Bay Area is well-acquainted with the devil’s bargain of white-knight philanthropy and the capriciousness of Big Tech donors, and many residents doubt the Academy will ever materialize.
Both in San Francisco and across the country, the tech industry has demonstrated its indifference to its physical environs and their respective histories, preferring instead to spread its faux-utopian, corporate sameness in the name of functionalism and productivity. SFAI is in danger of becoming a bizarre Frankenstein of its former self, re-animated by the tech world’s bizarre obsession with “creativity.” In “Last Art School,” as if to protest the myriad ways in which higher education is being drained of all feeling and then resurrected as institutional taxidermy, White hung Jon Rubin’s An Art School that Stops the Bleeding (2018–23), which renders the eponymous phrase in varsity letters sewn onto felt backing, above a half-hidden stairwell in the gallery’s rear.
In Claire Bishop’s 2012 book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, the art historian and critic draws attention to the Dutch right-wing coalition government’s emphasis on creativity in the 2010s. By using the artist as a model for a temporary laborer, the conservative party was able to encourage people to accept losses in job security, welfare, and minimum pay guarantees in return for “relative freedom”; as Bishop describes, the government “considered it important to develop creativity in schools” because its citizens are “increasingly required to assume the individualisation associated with creativity: to be entrepreneurial, embrace risk, look after their own self-interest, perform their own brands, and be willing to self-exploit.”5
This all-too-common notion that the arts and “creativity” are worthy of investment only if they produce exploitable labor begs the question: how could any art school not be broke? At SFAI, the administration was, to quote White, “harebrained,” terrible with money, and in need of a stronger bureaucratic structure. White recalled that she could open the door the to the president’s office at any time and would often find him smiling, sitting at his desk with his shoes kicked off, ready for a conversation. The school never adopted profit-maximizing strategies. It never worked as a business. Therefore, it closed. But at least it was still an art school when it did.
Wild geese decorate the exterior of the Seeburg jukebox that White installed in the corner of her fabricated diner. “This is a good one for us,” she said, as a song’s first notes coincided with our reflection on the loss of a mutual friend, Margaret Tedesco, an artist and curator who worked as a graphic designer at SFAI for over a decade. Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco warbled into the room.
In “Last Art School,” White crafted a site for visitors to gather, to meet each other, to loiter, and to sit in an art space with no agenda—or perhaps with the agenda of receiving a cup of free coffee. Several students whose first semesters at Hunter College coincided with the show told me that they thought the Chat & Chew diner had always been there and was just a part of the school. In this way, the installation works like a hopeful projection and proposition to the students. What if your art school did have a space like this? What if spaces and moments akin to these, free from the pressures of high performance, productivity, profit, could survive this increasingly brutal time?
As if to echo Ruth Faison Shaw’s adage about the role of the teacher, “Last Art School” succeeded in constructing a “reassuring presence” for its visitors. By honoring the legacies of SFAI, creating a commons, and showing art’s potential outside of pure profit, White provided an increasingly rarified experience. Perhaps most meaningfully of all, she understood that the most significant component of her project was the community that began to congregate within it.
Ruth Faison Shaw, Finger Painting: A Perfect Medium for Self-Expression (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1934), 13.
Shaw, Finger Painting, 24.
The Poetry Foundation, “Poets, David Lynch Wants You to Write Poems About Diners,” October 11, 2012 →.
“San Francisco Art Institute, Diego Rivera Mural Sold,” Artforum, March 4, 2024 →.
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 16.
