CCA’s back to school on a brand-new campus
The culmination of California College of the Arts’ campus expansion project has arrived to welcome students, faculty, and staff in an added 82,000+ of innovative makerspaces, labs, shops, and more.
CCA students return for back to school in an all-new campus experience
What was once a bold vision, digital renderings, and blueprints is now a reality. The campus of the future we dreamed and worked diligently toward building for future generations of students to realize their creative and artistic ambitions opened just in time for the start of the new semester.
Our first week back on this new CCA offers a peek at the exciting future ahead for this community of makers: we explored our fresh surroundings and the potential of new studios and makerspaces, we worked with our hands on day one, and we celebrated past and future with celebratory orientations for first-year students and a new exhibition highlighting CCA’s artistic history in our Potrero Hill community.
On the first day of classes, students streamed into the campus in a new and open, plaza-like entrance that joins the college's main building with the newly minted sections.
The ground floor of the expanded campus is where much of the craft disciplines have their new homes. Furniture students got started learning the methods of cutting and shaping wood and the furniture projects they’ll make in class. Ceramics students began throwing clay and making use of the new indoor-outdoor maker yards. And we began experimenting in the upgraded Hybrid Lab and Rapid Prototyping Studio.
Just across the street, the First Year Core Studio program welcomed new students in the First Year Welcome Fair. Greeted to the sounds of our very own Bands of Musicians club, first-year students picked up their Supply Kits, attended workshops to make buttons, decorate flags, and personalize their sketchbooks, as well as meet their classmates, and even register to vote.
We also paid homage to the artistic legacy of our neighborhood by opening the new exhibition Potrero Hill Perspectives at our Campus Gallery, which featured the work of artists such as Robert Bechtle, Rudolph Schaeffer, and Theodore Polos, who previously taught at CCA. (The exhibition is on view through Saturday, November 2, 2024 at 1480 17th Street in San Francisco.)
As we look to the future, we’re embracing the possibilities and braving the potential of what art, design, architecture, and the humanities and sciences could look like as we also learn how to make this new campus our own. And there will be new opportunities for visiting artists, lecturers, and speakers to present their work in talks and exhibitions, offering new perspectives and points of connection.
Yna Barirang works at the Tool Checkout Center on the expanded campus.
But coming up first, it’s time to celebrate: You’re invited to join us during our opening celebration on October 19. Tour our new campus, toast to the past, present, and future, and join us for the exhibition opening at the all-new Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, All This Soft Wild Buzzing.
