Why Losing CCA Hurts So Much

California College of the Arts is closing. If you’ve been tracking the downward spiral of colleges in the United States, the announcement likely came as no surprise. The same cannot be said of CCA’s students, faculty and staff, whom the college notified of the impending closure just hours before it broke to the media. Losing the last remaining art school in a city once renowned for its defiant creative spirit is more than disappointing. It’s a dismal sign that San Francisco no longer knows itself. 

Soon my time at CCA will exist only in the candlelit glow of my nostalgia. This is my history with an institution that saved me, educated me, indebted me, and ultimately revealed my purpose. Thank you, I love you, I’ll forgive your betrayal to art and artists everywhere when you forgive my student loans.

My life really did start at California College of the Arts, and I long hoped to return as a professor. Like some literary salmon, it felt right to make my way back to the place I found my voice to help other artists achieve the same. Maybe there’s a part of me that never left the sheltered, arboreal campus. Like author, KQED reporter, and fellow CCA alum Sarah Hotchkiss attested, “CCA is the reason I’m in San Francisco, in this job, in the arts. It was in CCA’s MFA program that I met some of my closest friends, my first KQED editor, and a network of professional artists who taught me how to make my way in the Bay Area art world.” 

In 2011, I lived alone in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Certain I’d be dead before thirty, I was wasting my last decade on Earth however I saw fit. Snorting crushed Xanax started as a way to pass the time, then morphed into a swiftly crumbling path to oblivion. By then, only my friends online (who were not privy to my everyday reality) kept in touch. One lived here in the Bay Area, which I had not visited. I booked discounted airfare and flew to California in March to see him, soon after the devastating Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. During my stay, he introduced me to another friend who studied screenprinting at California College of the Arts. 

I felt supremely uncool next to his friend and his classmates as they all smoked rollies, rebuking their latest critics. We stood at the top of campus, between Martinez and Nahl Halls. It was dark, wet, slick. Water beaded on a patchwork marble landing littered with leaves, twigs, and cigarette butts, reflecting orange floodlights. I watched the artists smoke, how raindrops pierced their exhalations, visible in the tangerine glow. To me, art schools only existed in France, in Rococo halls with floor-to-ceiling windows for bountiful Parisian light. But there in North Oakland at the base of the Berkeley Hills, a paradisiacal campus teemed with artists my age. 

Later that night, my self-pity gave way to the truth hiding underneath: the feeling of missing out.  

I’d already given up on college. My mom stamped out my dreams of acting and cheffing like they were coiled up in one flaming bag of dogshit. Community college proved to be just an extension of high school and I dropped out just the same. Writing was the last passion I harbored from her crushing brand of “realism.” So my California friends encouraged me to apply to CCA’s Writing & Literature program. 

The night I submitted my application, I couldn’t sleep—surprisingly, not for want of Xanax. Once you find something to live for, oblivion starts to lose its appeal. There just might be something on the other side of this, I told myself. Six weeks later, notice of my acceptance arrived, and I moved to California in August 2011. Getting into CCA not only plucked me out of Kansas City and away from homophobic family, it assured me I had something worth saving. 

Admittedly, I spent more of my first semester smoking pot than studying foundational texts and concepts every professor referenced thereafter. But I turned my shit around once I realized what an incredible (expensive) gift an education here was. CCA offered rigor with reason. My teachers actually cared to explain how our practice had stakes beyond and unrelated to a letter grade. We didn’t enroll to put meaningless noise in the world but to engage and contribute to the discourse we’d joined. We were there to bridge disciplines, movements, cultures and consciousnesses; we were there to make art. All we had to do was show up, finish the work, and say something useful now and then. 

My first term at CCA began nearly fifteen years ago. In the unpredictable time since, I earned my BFA and MFA, wrote a full-length manuscript, and got hired by the writer whose work introduced me to the rest of the Bay Area, Broke-Ass Stuart. Most recently I reentered academia and taught my own batch of wide-eyed undergrads. Much of the material and pedagogies of my art school professors generated the same unmistakable lightbulb moments in my students. 

In that way, CCA’s legacy still plays on, in the art and teachings of its brilliant faculty and alumni. If only administrators were wiser and sold the SF campus to some tech company that would’ve folded in the pandemic. The school should have consolidated in Oakland. Of the real estate CCA possessed, the Oakland campus outdid it all in beauty, location and total appeal. We adored the shaded pebbled paths, creeping vines, manicured gardens and their redwood sentinels; Brutalist buildings dripping in ivy. It’s college, like a string of Christmas lights barely illuminating a messy dorm room. But to me and generations of artists, it’s where we first recognized ourselves.  

News of CCA’s closure left me wondering: What’s next for kids like me? Students with stories to share, whose withering hopes depend on spaces that nurture creativity and introduce creatives to their peers? I fear that without artistic incubators like CCA, big tech and their political yes-men got their wish. To them, “creative” means you can speak offshore investments or cryptocurrency, that you built some app that siphons financial data from the unsuspecting public. I hope I didn’t just witness the Bay Area’s artistic spirit slip beneath the waves like a sinking ocean liner. 

What is the Bay Area without art, without artists? 

^{All photos by the author unless otherwise specified.}