Implications of California College of the Arts Closure Becoming Clearer

On January 13, 2026, California College of the Art’s students, faculty and staff woke up to an unexpected email. The message, from the college’s president, David Howse, announced that CCA would shutter at the end of the 2026-2027 academic year; the campus, including buildings constructed as recently as 2024, would become a satellite of Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. 

To many, the news was shocking. Zipporah Hinds, a CCA senior who’d expected to continue at the school as a graduate student, cried when she read the email on a plane returning from winter break.

The implications of CCA’s closing are becoming clearer. The Vanderbilt deal fended off CCA’s potential collapse, or dramatic shrinkage, sparing Showplace Square from being beset with a cluster of empty buildings. For students who weren’t scheduled to graduate by Spring 2027, CCA has established “teach-out” mechanisms, allowing them to finish early or transfer to other schools, credits intact. CCA’s status as Northern California’s last nonprofit art school after the 2022 shuttering of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) means that the school’s approximately 500 faculty and staff and the City’s art scene may suffer the most.

The SFAI campus will ultimately reopen as the California Academy of Studio Arts, hosting yearlong programs for up to 30 emerging visual artists. It’ll be free and unaccredited, providing space, shared workshops, mentorship from practicing artists, with exhibitions, performances, and artist talks.

CCA was founded in Berkeley in 1907 under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1922, the college moved to a leafy campus in Oakland, where it offered academic programs in art glass, ceramics, painting, sculpture and other fields. In 1996, the school bought a San Francisco property previously used as a Greyhound Bus maintenance yard and, in line with its design district location, offered furniture making courses. CCA steadily expanded its physical campus and academic programs in San Francisco, eventually offering majors in architecture, industrial and fashion design and comics.

In 2022, CCA consolidated its operations in San Francisco, with a plan to sell its Oakland campus. That same year, the school broke ground on a Studio-Gang-designed San Francisco extension that it financed with a $40 million loan that added to the college’s already considerable debt. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the idea was to repay the loans with proceeds from increased enrollment and the sale of the Oakland campus. Income from neither source materialized. CCA’s enrollment dropped sharply, in part due to a decline in international student matriculation. Sale of the Oakland campus was thwarted by market conditions, including high interest rates and inflation. 

Several months after the closure announcement students are solidifying plans to complete their degrees or begin new courses of study. Hinds, a senior with an individualized Fine Arts major, said that she transferred her acceptance at CCA’s master’s for fine arts program to Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, with Otis waiving its original application deadline. Hinds would’ve preferred to continue at CCA but is happy she’ll be studying with at least one of her CCA professors, who is also moving to Otis. 

According to Hinds, in the past CCA students often had difficulty receiving credit for their CCA coursework at other colleges. Nevertheless, a fellow student, who wasn’t on track to graduate by Spring 2027, had been able to arrange a Fall 2026 transfer to the Pratt Institute in New York with full credit for completed coursework. 

Carson, a ceramics student from China, was aiming to finish his undergraduate degree in Spring 2027 by increasing his course load to six classes per semester. If that plan failed, he said, he’d transfer.

Griff Williams, an artist and gallery owner, said that because many CCA faculty members teach courses that aren’t offered at colleges not focused on art and design they wouldn’t be able to find equivalent jobs in the Bay Area. These faculty members need to look for similar teaching work outside the region or search for alternate employment. 

Maria Porges, a full-time Graduate Fine Arts faculty member for about 20 years, had planned to work at CCA for three more years before retiring. Now, her career will be cut short. Porges said her union was negotiating with the school’s administration for severance pay.

ARCH Art Supplies has been doing business on Potrero Hill since 2001. The shop is currently located at the base of Blattner Hall, an eight-year-old building on 17th Street that’s leased to CCA for use as student housing through 2028. ARCH’s general manager, Mac Warrick, said that despite about 30 percent of its trade being linked to CCA, the store hoped that modifications to its product lineup would allow it to remain open. Vanderbilt representatives had stopped by, Warrick said, and it seemed possible the university would continue to lease Blattner Hall, keeping ARCH as a subtenant.

The Wattis Institute, an exhibition venue and research facility, is the only CCA element that Vanderbilt has pledged to keep. Previously located on Kansas Street, the Institute recently moved to a space on the expanded main campus. The Wattis directorship draws international leaders who tend to use it as a launchpad to positions at larger organizations in London and New York. 

CCA operates Campus Gallery, located next door to ARCH in Blattner Hall, which offers extension courses and TBD*, a collaborative program the View participated in last year to receive design aid from CCA students. FUTUREFORMS, an art and design studio headed by CCA faculty members Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno, has installed at least three public art works in Potrero Creek or Mission Bay since 2018. The studio’s Orbital, located on Pierpoint Lane near Chase Center, invites multiple interpretations and acknowledges its surroundings, in contrast to Burning Man art, which tends to be more pedantic and detached from place, that’s installed elsewhere in the City.

Many of the artists, arts journalists, gallery owners and other arts professionals in San Francisco arrived as CCA or SFAI students. Whether the City’s arts ecosystem will remain healthy without such nonprofit art schools remains to be seen.