San Francisco Artwork Institute Information for Chapter

The ailing San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) has filed for bankruptcy, the San Francisco Chronicle first reported. The school, whose campus features an iconic and site-specific mural by Diego Rivera from 1931, had struggled for years financially before making its 2020 decision to support the current student body by starting and discontinuing admissions and degree programs. SFAI administration and board members made several attempts to save the school through fundraising, seeking partnerships, and even selling the Rivera mural.
SFAI filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection on April 19. In order to pay off its hundreds to millions of dollars in debt, the school is required to liquidate all of its assets. Its creditors include SFAI’s landlords; a pest control company; AT&T; the University of San Francisco; and each fired faculty member who is owed severance pay.
Inside and outside the institution, some blame the school’s failure on declining enrollment, prohibitively high tuition and board mismanagement of finances, as well as an extravagant, $14 million debt-incurring expansion to a satellite campus at Pier 2 on the San Francisco Bay Area Year 2017. The satellite campus closed in mid-2020 amid the pandemic and began looking for subtenants to take on the remaining 50 years of the lease.
In 2020, SFAI raised approximately $4 million in funding to stay afloat and serve its tenured faculty and remaining student body through inception, and leaders were excited to find other funding and partnership opportunities to protect the school’s heritage. The University of California Board of Regents stepped in and paid off SFAI’s debt, effectively becoming the institution’s new landlord and thwarting its foreclosure. As 2021 begins, the school is once again keen to pay off its multi-million dollar debt and explored an opportunity to sell Diego Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City (1931), which was last appraised at $50 million, only to meet fierce backlash from the school’s union workers as well as San Francisco residents, many of whom were pushing for the city to recognize the mural as a landmark.
In a last-ditch effort to persevere, SFAI considered a partnership with the University of San Francisco that was intended to be solidified in early 2022, but ultimately fell through, leading to the school’s decision to officially close for good on July 15 of this year – itself as non-profit organization to protect its name, history and archives. “After years of planning and the immeasurable sacrifices of our students, faculty and staff, it is deeply unfortunate that we are now faced with this present outcome,” then-Chairman and photography alum Lonnie Graham said in the school’s official statement on the move’s permanent closure .
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Rivera’s mural would stay for now and could later end up in a public gallery. SFAI has not yet responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.