Our Mission

Our aim is to promote a collaborative, supportive, and inclusive creative community of San Francisco Art Institute alumni worldwide. We build upon SFAI's 151-year legacy with a commitment to its core values of critical thinking, artistic exploration, and personal expression. In light of SFAI's current closure, our stewardship of alumni contacts, interactions and programming is more important than ever.

Background & Purpose

We started SFAA in a time of pandemic, the school’s ongoing financial uncertainty, and SFAI’s limited enrollment after the 2020 fiscal year. At that point, a small group of SFAI alumni decided to proactively organize and coordinate support for current students who were facing not only a global health crisis, but also an interruption of their education and a profound concern for their beloved school.

We felt and continue to feel an immeasurable obligation to both SFAI and its community. Although SF Artists Alumni was established in June of 2020 as a result of traumatic events, we exist as a celebration of our shared vision.

The purpose of SF Artists Alumni is to foster artistic expression, continue our 150 year legacy of cultural and artistic change makers, and promote the general welfare of SFAI alumni. Our goal is to support and promote our alumni and their work, and to strengthen the ties that bind us to each other and to the SFAI community at large.

Vision

SF Artists Alumni is an alliance run by alumni for alumni. We envision a thriving, collaborative community of artists and arts professionals coming together to support one another professionally, academically and artistically. We visualize a community that is open, transparent and authentic. We see our association, its relationship to the school, and it's core values as a way of life. We foster an umbrella community for all graduating classes from all eras. We are here to extend the concept of SFAI as a living legacy of creative expression and professional support to the alumni and beyond. We foresee the momentum of 150 years of the avant-garde going strong within our community.