Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education.
Then I brought it up with JD Beltran, a longtime friend prominent in the San Francisco art scene, who herself was suffering under the weight of $150,000 in art-school debt, which she’d incurred in the late 1990s. She’d been carrying that debt for thirty years—for a degree in painting she got in 1998 from the San Francisco Art Institute—and together we started mapping out an alternative.
It’s important to note that the current model for art schools is very new. For about a thousand years, until the twentieth century, artists typically either apprenticed for a master artist, learning their trade by working in a studio, or attended loose ateliers where a group of artist-students studied under an established artist, and paid very little to do so. These students would help maintain the studio, they would hire models, they would practice their craft together, and the studio’s owner would instruct these students while still creating his own work—usually in the same building.
Somehow, though, we went from a model where students paid little to nothing, and learned techniques passed down through the centuries, to a system where students pay $100,000, and often learn very little beyond theory. A recent graduate of one of our country’s most respected MFA programs—not in the Bay Area—told me that in her third year as an MFA student, she paid over $100,000 in tuition and fees, and in exchange, she met with her advisor once every two weeks. That third year, there were no classes, no skills taught—there was only a twice-monthly meeting with this advisor. Each meeting lasted one hour. Over the course of that third year, she met with this advisor twenty times, meaning that each of these one-hour sessions cost the MFA student $5,000. And during these sessions, again, no hard skills were taught. It was only theory, only discussion. At the rate of $5,000 an hour (and of course her instructor was not the recipient of this $5,000/hr!) This seems to be an inequitable system in need of adjustment.
So JD Beltran and I started thinking of an alternative. For years, it was little more than idle chatter until one day in 2022, I was biking around the Embarcadero, and happened to do a loop around Pier 29, and because one of its roll-top doors was open, I saw that it was enormous, and that it was empty.
JD and I started making inquiries with the Port of San Francisco, a government agency that oversees the waterfront. They’re the agency that helped the Giants ballpark get built, who helped reopen the Ferry Building, and made it possible for the Exploratorium to relocate from the Palace of Fine Arts to their current location on the waterfront. In the forty years since the collapse of the wretched highway that used to cover the Embarcadero, the Port of SF has done great things to make that promenade a jewel of the city...
The core of our proposal was this: Ten established artists would get free studio space in the pier. At a time when all visual artists are struggling to find and keep studio space in this expensive city, this free studio space would help some of our best local artists stay local.
In exchange for this free studio space, these ten established artists would agree to teach a cohort of twenty emerging artists, who also would be given free studio space in the pier.
That was the core of the idea. Simple, we hoped. And it would bring thirty visual artists all to Pier 29, to learn from each other, and the emerging artists would get a world-class, graduate-level education. And because thirty artists would be occupying the pier, the staffing required to maintain the program would be minimal. The thirty resident artists would become caretakers of the space.
Thus began fourteen months of meetings, proposals, and permitting discussions. The Port’s staff were encouraging, because that part of the Embarcadero is a very quiet zone, with few restaurants or cafés—and those who were there, struggle. (The famed Fog City Diner of Mrs. Doubtfire, recently went under.) But finally, after fourteen months and thousands of hours put in by Art + Water and CAST, the Port and the City granted us a lease on Pier 29.
OUR NEW MODEL, WHICH IS A VARIATION ON THE OLD MODEL
For the educational component of the Art + Water program, I did some napkin math and discovered something so simple that I assumed it couldn’t work: If each of these ten established artists taught just three hours a week, together they would provide these twenty emerging artists with thirty hours of instruction per week. These three hours wouldn’t put too great a burden on any one of the established artists, but the accumulated knowledge imparted each week by these ten established—and varied, and successful—artists would be immeasurable. And they would be able to do it for free.
And because the thirty artists, established and emerging, would be sharing one pier, they’d be able to consult with each other regularly, even outside of class hours, and more mentorship and camaraderie would occur organically. (One of the strangest things about many advanced art-school programs is how distant the teachers’ and students’ studios are from each other. For hundreds of years, apprentices were able to see, and even participate in, the making of the established artists’ work. Now, that’s largely lost. Professors work across town, or in distant cities; the two practices are miles apart, and so much knowledge is never transferred. When BFA and MFA students are around only other students, they can’t see how successful working artists make their art, or indeed how they make a living.)
With Art + Water, the hope was that if these emerging artists had their studios right next to successful artists, they could see how the work was created, they could ask questions, and they could even assist (just as apprentices used to assist the master artists). Infinitely more knowledge would be transferred through this proximity than could ever be in a classroom-only program.
So when I did my 3 × 10 = 30 napkin math, JD Beltran, who had not only gotten an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute but had also taught at SFAI, the California College of Art, SF State, and Stanford, shocked me by agreeing that my napkin math made sense to her, too. So we kept pressing on.
by Dave Eggers, McSweeny's | Read more:
Image: McSweeny's
[ed. Great idea. Why did mentorships fall away?]
