Meet Chair Kim Anno
CCA’s Painting/Drawing Program is the largest fine art program at the college, with a history that revels in a strong traditional foundation as well as an expansive curriculum that allows for contemporary experimentation in materials, subject, and process.
Painting Student Community
Painting/Drawing students are encouraged to create and nourish a concept of an artists’ community while at CCA. This is accomplished through our Painting Lecture Series, the studio environment, the critique process, the exhibition opportunities on campus, and the balanced spread of day and evening courses.
We have sophomore and junior review alike in which a team of faculty participates. We encourage student-led events, exhibitions, and organizations.
Whether on the San Francisco or Oakland campus, the Painting/Drawing Department comprises a vibrant, challenging, and encouraging community of artists.
Rigorous Contemporary Painting History
We acknowledge the modern and contemporary history of painting is vast, so we offer students two in-depth opportunities: two successive contemporary painting history courses. This is in addition to the visual studies requirements all students must complete.
Senior Studios
All Painting/Drawing majors receive their own studio during senior year, which fosters an active community of painters at the San Francisco campus. The adjacent studios are for upper-level courses that provide a hub of activity.
The Painting/Drawing curriculum builds each year toward the sustained and challenging senior year in which students present their culminating solo exhibition.
Our renowned faculty encourages original, independent ideas at every class level of painting courses. The proximity of the graduate studios is also a tremendous influence on our undergraduate students.
Start-Up Gallery Exhibition Opportunities
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a plethora of nonprofit and start-up galleries in the Mission and SOMA (south of Market) districts, as well as throughout Oakland and Berkeley.
Several professors organize independent exhibitions for students at off-campus venues—Bay Area, Los Angeles, and beyond. Many of our current students and alumni exhibit their work at these venues as well as participate as producers.
We in the Painting/Drawing Program encourage a community dynamic that teaches each student to step out of his or her studio and work on behalf of their colleagues and fellow artists. We are delighted when Painting/Drawing students empower themselves to share their work in a multitude of situations within the broader art community.
Students and alumni also are creating contemporary art blogs, created in the spirit of magazines, and podcasts. All of this, including the array of world-class San Francisco / East Bay museums, creates a community of artists that is provocative, talented, and teeming with vital energy.
Vibrant Bay Area Painting Community
The Bay Area’s cultural intersection makes for a diverse and cosmopolitan population. It is precisely this intermix of people that fosters a culturally rich painting community.
The Painting/Drawing Department aims to present an arena wherein the painting discipline embraces a plurality of media, culture, sexuality, and process. We are committed to studio work where the handmade art object is revered, questioned, studied, and celebrated.
My Work
My work spans three media: painting, photography, and video. I have been making paintings for 20 years, and recently I began to make large-format photography, and high-definition experimental video.
A continuum exists among my painting and photography and video; all my art work exists at an intersection between art and science, with climate change and water at the fulcrum. I use tropes of pop culture and icons of art history to engage a conversation about the conditions of climate change.
However, the influence of abstraction and abstracting something remains prominent in my practice. The resulting work is open, playful, and engaged with a kind of difficult beauty.
I have also begun to work in collaboration with other artists and composers to create performative installation works using video. The works are created within a loose ensemble of artists and musicians called “Ice on the High.” Together with other artists I have begun to bring together video, sculpture, sound, and interactivity to my work.
Related
Faculty bio