IDEAS

UTOPIAN DREAMS

what CCA(C) is leaving behind

By Sophie Smith 

You're on public notice

The California College of the Arts, founded in 1907, is an art school… in California. For the past 100 plus years, it has promoted a unique approach to the teaching and learning of arts. The school used to be called California College of the Arts and Crafts until one fateful day in 2003 when the crafts died an ignoble death for branding purposes. While the dropping of the craft seemed like an innocent choice, a vision of greater inclusivity across the arts, that wasn’t the full story. Internally, this was the school refocusing their sights on new design programs which had been introduced in the 1980s and ‘90s. Notably, when you look up “CCA name change 2003” on Google, the top result is a prison complex Corrections Corporation of America (aka CCA) going through a name change as well. This might be a bad joke, but it gets at the tricky truth of institutional identity.

In the 1990s CCA (the art school) bought property in San Francisco to make more room for their growing architecture and design programs. As time passed, CCA put more resources into the new San Francisco campus. This campus, sleek, white, and frenetic existed in total contrast to the funky and eclectic Oakland Campus. The San Francisco campus has come to represent the growing design industry (architecture, product design, fashion design, industrial design, furniture design, etc.) while the Oakland campus embodies the spirit of fine arts and crafts. In 2019, my first year attending CCA, the administration announced that they would be selling the Oakland campus and moving the entire school to San Francisco. In the fall of 2021, CCA partially opened up both campuses for the first time in a year and a half after spending time exclusively teaching art via online classes during the pandemic.

Art or Covid?

As a senior in the sculpture department, I was ecstatic to finally get back on campus. As it turns out, teaching and learning subjects such as welding and ceramics through an online platform does not work too well: try welding online. Upon returning to Oakland, I was met with a campus in disarray. The vast population of native California plants covering the grounds were dead, sad, and forgotten and programs such as community arts, sculpture, and glass had been neglected. We were told that this was the last year that Oakland Campus was going to be operational and that we should be excited about the move as it will lend itself to the most inclusive version of CCA. However, it is hard to be excited for something when that something is the cause of your current disregard.

Be excited for the new San Francisco campus they say, even though adequate spaces for glass and ceramic furnaces and metal shops have yet to be built. Be excited about the revamped sense of community, when creating a community has turned you into the burdensome ugly stepchild of the family. From the outside, this move may appear to have the best intentions, one step of many to create a utopic future for CCA. Nonetheless it is important to inspect what is being lost in this transition. This move is indicative of CCA’s distancing from fine arts in an effort to elevate its design majors, stripping the school of its comfortingly funky past in order to create an unblemished sleek future, leaving all those who don’t fit into its perfect little box in the dust.

Flashes of a soon past

Founded by Frederick Meyer, CCA first began as an arts and craft school operating out of a couple of studios in Berkeley, California. They moved around as the student and faculty grew and eventually landed at the Treadwell estate in the heart of Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood in 1922. The Treadwell estate offered four acres of lush, tree-clad land nestled in the Oaklands hills. This property allowed the school to expand, transforming the former houses and carriage rooms left by the Treadwell’s into unconventional spaces for art making. As the college grew, new buildings were added.

This attitude of adding by necessity, as opposed to a cohesive plan, led to the eclectic character of the campus: old victorian houses in harmony with mid-century brutalist and rustic third bay traditional architecture. While walking through the campus, you might notice that each individual building is stylistically at odds with each other; however, the campus manages to seem of a piece in strangely comforting ways. This comfort is brought on by the 100 years of gradual growth which mimics the way nature will change and adapt over time.

A Brutalist Library that somehow fit

In this way the campus developed organically, with each new building embodying a different set of values from the last. Just like we try on different hats, experience life through different lenses, sometimes completely contradicting the ones before and after. They are all a representation of you, but a you that has been allowed the time to grow and adjust organically. What’s disturbing about the present change is how abrupt and inorganic it is.

In contrast to Oakland’s cohesively eclectic campus the San Francisco campus is sleek, modern, and unified, with a majority of the buildings being completed in the last 20 years. Since its opening, there's been a space for designers to flourish. The main building, a reconceived former Greyhound bus depot, offers tall ceilings, white walls, and state of the art design facilities. With an open classroom floor plan the building feels like a maze to those unfamiliar with it.

SF in action

The Oakland and San Francisco campuses exist in rivalry. The majority of students who exist on one campus have a very difficult time understanding the necessity and lure of the other.The design kids don’t understand why they have to leave San Francisco, the hub of the bay area and the utopic future of CCA, to study at the obsolete relic of CCA’s past, while the fine arts kids in Oakland fear having to learn and create in the sterility of a building with no soul and no past.

Of the rivalry between art and design, CCA has silently decided the winner. They have quietly pulled funding for the arts in favor of the more profitable design fields. All the while refusing to acknowledge their role in the finale of the competition, time and time again justifying their actions under the guise of unity and collaboration. Coming from someone on the losing side of the battle, this hurts three-fold. First, this decision directly affects my practice as an artist. I pay the same tuition as students in game design, and while the school is building them a brand new gaming room to play in, I have to work around the school's decision to close the foundry. My practice has become rooted in spite. I continue to make art that I am proud of but under increasingly difficult circumstances.

This leads me to the next punch. The school has managed to turn our spiteful actions against us by proclaiming their pride in the fine arts students who achieve notable accolades, doting on them, parading them around, and ignoring the fact that the only thing they've done is create obstacles for the artists to overcome. Lastly, as someone who has put up with countless “so how are you going to make money when you're older?” remarks from friends of my parents, I feel confident and justified putting my eggs in the fine arts basket of an accredited arts institution. But when that institution turns around and says “you know what? You are fucked, you’re not bringing in enough money. We’re jumping ship”, it definitely stings. Okay, maybe they didn’t say that verbatim, but that's certainly what their actions feel like.

Visions of Utopia

In creating an utopia, reminders of the past are destroyed. When new civilizations take over, the first place they burn down is the library, the place that houses the history of society's past. The oakland campus acts as a reminder to the schools of its history. It is sad and dangerous for an institution to pave over their past in order to start anew. How can you create a utopia when greed is at the root of your motives? I suppose that’s how many visions of utopias are formed, but they never seem to succeed, if anything, spiraling us closer and closer to new and unrealized realities.

It is a rainy day at the Oakland campus today. I could count the number of students I’ve encountered in the past 10 hours on no more than two hands. The sculpture building is cold with no glass furnace to omit a radiating warmth. There is no buzzing or banging emerging from the metal or wood shops. My energy is plummeting and I am in desperate need of a caffeine fix but with the campus cafe shut down the nearest coffee is a schlep. I leave the sculpture building to take a stroll around the campus to get my blood pumping. The pathways are strewn with dead leaves and branches waiting to get swept up. It is raining but many of the plants have already died of neglect. The rain cannot solve what years of neglect has amounted to.

©Sophie Smith and the CCA Arts Review