BFAPrintmedia

Our program teaches you to expand upon the rich traditions of printmaking and books arts, including intaglio, lithography, relief, monotype, screenprinting, and photo printmaking. You’ll explore the medium’s potential as a platform for both creative expression and cultural change. With the San Francisco Bay Area as your backdrop, you’ll draw inspiration from museums, galleries, and alternative art spaces, world-renowned print publishers and studios, and socially engaged nonprofits. Our position within a top art and design college gives you daily access to a creative, collaborative culture, challenging you to push beyond your notions of what art can accomplish in the world.

In our fully equipped facilities, you’ll learn a full range of printmedia techniques in addition to digital printmaking, letterpress, and papermaking. We encourage you to experiment whenever possible and collaborate with your peers in fine arts. By incorporating drawing, textiles, sculpture, and other media into your projects, you’ll discover that print can do things like leap from walls and transform rooms into hypnotic installations.

Emerging artist residency at Kala

During their final semester, undergraduate printmedia majors can apply for the Hamaguchi Emerging Artist Residency. The recipient is given part-time access to the prestigious Kala Art Institute, located in Berkeley. They have total freedom to explore independent projects in various printmaking techniques, photo processes, book arts, and digital media. Culminating in a group exhibition, this is the perfect experience for those who want to continue their studio practice or pursue their studies in master's programs.

Anthea Black is a Canadian artist based in Toronto and the Bay Area. Her studio practice addresses queer and trans archives, collaboration, materiality, and moves between representation, experience and abstraction. Black’s artist-publishing work includes The HIV Howler: Transmitting Art and Activism newspaper and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education, a queer and trans pedagogy project that took form as a collaborative letterpress book, and Reprinting the UNESCO Status of the Artist Archive 1980-2020. As a curator, Black's exhibitions include SUPER STRING (2005), No Place: Queer Geographies on Screen (2012-2016), Pleasure Craft (2016), and The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist Book touring through 2024. Black is an Associate Professor of Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Our students combine interdisciplinary interests with skills in traditional and contemporary printmedia to pursue a range of creative practices. Many establish their own studios and exhibit work in both commercial and nonprofit spaces. Others create political work and support their communities through public education projects. While each finds a unique pathway to the professional art world, they all share a desire to participate in an enriching cultural dialogue.