Arts Degree Courses in San Francisco

SFAI - San Francisco Art Institute:
Located on Russian Hill overlooking beautiful San Francisco Bay, the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) is an accredited art school that offers a wide-range of Certificate, Diploma, and Degree programs in art & design fields that include Animation, Art History, Fine Arts, Photography, and more. We provide a variety of undergraduate and graduate options for students from our fully equipped facilities and state-of-the-art technology resources on campus. SFAI emphasizes vision, imagination, intellectual development, hands-on experience, and engagement with the world.

Undergraduate Programs
San Francisco Art Institute’s focus on skills, experimentation, and active dialogue makes it a perfect place to explore and emerge as the artist, writer, or scholar you want to become. Our Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) and Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree programs are designed to develop your ability to think creatively and to give you the confidence to realize your vision. The program will provide you with equal-parts skill development, guidance, challenging discussion, and the freedom to explore and experiment. Since an undergraduate program is an important time to focus on your interests, SFAI’s curriculum offers adaptable opportunities, including studio practice, seminars, critiques, tutorials with individual faculty members, and internships, enabling you to design your own individualized learning program.

Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree Program
Fundamentally, education at SFAI is a process of dialogue and reflection; it is attuned to the challenges and responsibilities of the individual in a changing global world, and it engages a broad range of knowledge and technologies. This education is creative and generative, self-directed, yet collaborative; it reflects the role artists play in shaping our collective understanding. In the end, SFAI’s education is not about one single necessary outcome; instead it is an education for possibility that prepares you to shape your work and life in effective and unexpected ways. Specifically, it encourages you to question the accepted definitions of art, to build new tools for your practice, to redefine the venues for the exhibition of art, and to define new audiences for contemporary art. As our alumni attest, San Francisco Art Institute educates students as innovators and leaders in a wide range of professional endeavors.

Bachelor of Arts Degree Program
San Francisco Art Institute's Bachelor of Arts program is a challenge to students to be as curious about the world-at-large as they are about the world of art. It represents the depth of SFAI's commitment to preparing students to be engaged world citizens — as creative thinkers, activists, explorers, and visionaries. The Bachelor of Arts degree programs support the role of research and other forms of knowledge production at SFAI and are based on the premise that critical reading, thinking, and writing informed by an in depth understanding of theory and practice are essential for engaging and understanding contemporary art and global society. SFAI offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in two areas of study: History and Theory of Contemporary Art and
Urban Studies.

Bachelor of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art
The program in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at SFAI provides students with an in-depth and critical understanding of the history of the ideas, conditions, institutions, and discourses surrounding contemporary art and culture and how these inform the study, interpretation, analysis, and exhibition of art today.

Master of Fine Arts
The two-year MFA program provides graduate students with the opportunity to explore studio production and theoretical work in a flexible structure that encourages individual development within an interdisciplinary context. The program stresses the importance of a profound understanding of the conditions in which art is produced. Students are exposed to methodologies of inquiry that foster innovative, analytic, and speculative thinking skills necessary for artistic development and creative production. The program’s internationally accomplished faculty are actively engaged in a range of disciplines and areas that include art and cultural theory, art history, film, video, sound, digital media, design, print media, photography, painting, sculpture, new genres, and writing. A number of the faculty hold appointments in the Centers for Interdisciplinary Study.
 
Master of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art
The program begins with the acknowledgment that the fraught legacy of Western modernity (capitalism, the enlightenment, modernism), underscored by colonialism and imperialism, produced a dominant set of lenses through which artistic procedures have been historicized. Yet, oftentimes this legacy has either been antagonistic to non-western artistic models or sublimated those models to a primitivist and ethnographic historiography. This subjugation of non-western artistic models has provided powerful incentives for radical cross-cultural interpretations of modern and contemporary art. Simultaneously, a number of critical disputes provided by feminism, post-colonialism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and discourses of identity and multiculturalism have further redefined and expanded art historical methodologies, thereby moving the study of contemporary art towards a richer disciplinary broadness.

Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies
Urban Studies at SFAI is a new studio and research-based program developed specifically to address the contributions of art, artists, and researchers to the urban domain.

Master of Arts in Urban Studies
The rapid growth of urban populations and the rise of cities as the primary spaces of human dwelling have transformed the way we think of social, political, economic, and cultural relationships. Migration, displacement, economic instability, and political turmoil have all affected settlement patterns. Meanwhile, population density has exacerbated the compass of cities and strained their coping and carrying capacities. These changes bring to the fore demands for new ways of constituting community, ethnicity, citizenship, kinship, and belonging. The pressures of a perpetually growing world have affected spatial dynamics and necessitate new regimes of urban geography and forms of living.

Master of Arts in Exhibition and Museum Studies
We are living during a cultural moment in which every aspect of life is perpetually displayed and constantly reviewed, interpreted, and consumed. The study of museums and exhibitions and their continuing expansion provides a unique avenue towards understanding the intersection of preservationism and constant display in contemporary culture.