California College of the Arts will close at the end of this academic year. In anticipation of its shuttering, I was part of the first round of layoffs.
As director of the Center for Art and Public Life, my role was to help nurture relationships between nonprofits and students. The Center offered mentoring, community, and civic love. I could have happily stayed there forever.
Each year my team grew, touching more Bay Area residents. This momentum was abruptly severed by CCA’s impending demise. The ache is deep. But the true pain is knowing that many artistic souls are experiencing something similar. Designers, architects, creators came to San Francisco because of a deep, unyielding drive in their souls. The City pulled them here. The bug bit them.
It bit me at thirteen. I was born in California but raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Seventh grade was brutal in that exquisitely excruciating way it is for kids who don’t quite fit: treacherous behavior of friends, the isolation of being different. That summer my mother put me on a plane alone to Los Angeles to visit her family, the ones I resembled, who felt like mine.
Towards the end of the trip, my aunt/godmother packed up her boys and brought us to San Francisco. The sun was out; the wind was biting. She bought me new clothes at the Union Square Esprit, different from anything back home. Eighth grade was coming. But standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, something shifted. The golden light found me and lit me from within. I felt the beat of a drum that matched my heart. I knew I’d be back, and in the hard moments that followed, I held onto that knowing.
If you grew up in San Francisco, you might recognize people like me. We’re like the Bay to Breakers salmon, those costumed runners who swim upstream through the City while everyone else heads in the opposite direction. Art school is where we find each other. So many of us spent years as the only salmon in our home rivers; the “odd” high school kid who had something to say, who felt a current coursing through them that no one else seemed to feel.
In our hometowns we’re the ones swimming the wrong way. When we arrive at art school and meet the rest of our species, we realize that while we aren’t cookie-cutter versions of each other, we’re in the same assortment package. This shared camaraderie becomes a safety net; artists look at the world through a lens of curiosity rather than judgment, seeing potential where others see decay. This mindset is visionary. It can transform a city.
While at CCA, I founded Love Lives in SF in response to the relentless negative press San Francisco was receiving post-COVID. Students arriving here had to convince their terrified parents it was safe. Once they landed, they found the media narrative was a farce.
Shreyas, a graduate architecture student from India, chuckled, “This is very nice here. The news has blown this completely out of proportion.”
Katayoun, from Iran, completed a second and third master’s degrees, in part because staying in school meant she didn’t have to return to a country whose government would arrest her for her art and for not wearing a hijab. When I told her about Love Lives in SF, she welled up. “Let’s do it,” she said.
Together we engaged fourth through 12th grade students through civic workshops about love and stewardship. We partnered with the Ferry Building and Union Square, inviting passersby to hand-build ceramic hearts and record audio messages about what they loved about the City. We fired those hearts at CCA, attached QR codes linked to each recording, and seeded more than 3,250 of them across San Francisco; small, unexpected moments of joy waiting to be found.
Our artists went into public spaces sixteen weekends a year. We received an Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design grant and hosted two international film festivals celebrating the City’s spirit. This is what artists do when you give them a city and ask them to love it back.
Working with CCA students was a gift. Angela, a brilliant visual artist, navigated her life in San Francisco with grace and complexity. Her parents traveled from out of town for her SOMArts opening, full of pride for the daughter they knew, leaving just before her partner arrived, someone who would have loved to meet them but couldn’t just yet. Angela held those two worlds with care, never letting either diminish the other.
Kaeli worked with me from her freshman year until after she graduated, her eighteen-year-old ideas transforming into twenty-two-year-old professional talent, with a now thriving illustration practice.
Yuni came from Mongolia to absorb the life of this City. Lilah, daughter of a civil rights lawyer, carries that same relentless curiosity in her ever-turning creative brain. My trans students — whom I’ll not name but will forever hold — gave me the joy of watching someone be exactly who they are, at every stage. Anthony, a Master of Fine Arts writing student with autism, used his words to empower kids like him.
They reminded me every day of the responsibility I had to them. They wouldn’t be welcome in much of this country. In San Francisco they can be themselves and share it with the rest of us.
There’s something about being in the presence of young people — their urgency, belief that things can change, the way they haven’t yet learned to accept what is — that keeps you honest. It keeps you hungry. And without that hunger, even the most visionary institutions can lose their way.
The San Francisco Art Institute — the oldest art school west of the Mississippi, founded in 1871 — is now scaffolding and silence. The people who paid the price for its collapse weren’t the executives at the top. They never are. At the national level, the organizations built to hold arts communities — to fight the forces that push artists and changemakers out — are being systematically defunded. The threads of the net are being severed. CCA will soon join them.
When a city stops tolerating its imperfections, it starts requiring conformity. Conformity has an appetite. It finds imperfection everywhere: in the person who looks different, sounds different, loves differently, moves to a particular drum. The artists are always the first to go. But they were the ones who told you the city had a heartbeat.
I’m raising my daughter here. She’s about to enter eighth grade. Thea calls herself a cold weather enthusiast. We’ve traveled to 42 states and 13 countries, places so spectacular she could imagine living there, others so hot she didn’t want to leave the hotel. No matter where we venture, when we return home to our cool summers, the fog, the grey, the golden light cutting through it all, we say the same thing: we live in the world’s most beautiful city. It fits us perfectly.
I want it to still be here for her the way it was for me. I want this city to remain the kind of place that can find a kid who doesn’t fit anywhere else and light her up from inside.
I’m still here. Fighting to keep my space. So that the memories of these incredible lives, and the legacies of the institutions that held them, are not quietly erased.
Tracy Tanner is an artist, arts mother, and Founder of Love Lives in SF. She joined the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts in 2018.
PV Staff 
Jessica Zimmer 