Technically it's not a dump, it's a transfer station: the 44-acre Recology site where most of San Francisco's garbage and recyclables pass through on their way to either a landfill or a recycling plant. To those who work there, know it, and love it, it's the dump. And for many local artists, including an impressive array of CCA alumni and faculty, it has been the site of a four-month-long scavenger hunt. Recology hosts a one-of-a-kind, intensely competitive residency program where for four months, 40 hours a week, a few lucky artists find inspiration, a literally endless stream of raw materials, a wide array of tools, and 2,000 square feet of studio space, leading up to a culminating exhibition event. The program just celebrated its 20th year. Not all of the artists make work that is specifically about reuse, but no one leaves without having been profoundly affected by the experience, without thinking about life and culture (and trash) in entirely new ways.

On May 20-21 Recology will host the final exhibition of current residents Alex Nichols (soon-to-be alumna from CCA's MFA Program in Writing), Scott Kildall, and Niki Ulehla. That such an obviously object-oriented residency welcomed Nichols, a writer, is an indication of how it continues to evolve and push the envelope of what "art" and "scavenging" mean. Some of the best-known works to come out of the residency have included Nathaniel Stookey's Junkestra (2007), which subsequently performed to a sold-out audience at Herbst Theater in San Francisco and released a recording, and the Styrofoam Hummer made by Andrew Junge (MFA 2002), which has gone on to tour numerous exhibition venues all over the country and has achieved legendary, mythical status among the dump workers.

Ask not what your function can do for your fashion, but rather what can your fashion can do for your function. — Anonymous

Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Best of Both Worlds

“Form over function” has taken on a whole new meaning for the students who completed last fall’s undergraduate “Fashioning Functional Gear” course. The interdisciplinary studio united the Fashion Design and Industrial Design programs in eco-conscious investigation and technological innovation.

Celebrated documentary filmmaker and chair of CCA's Film Program, Rob Epstein, whose not one but two Academy Award wins (Times of Harvey Milk, 1985; Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, 1990) have catapulted the openly gay filmmaker to ineludible master status both within and outside the LGBTQ community, was recently interviewed by Movieline.

Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine
Ashgate, 2011
Hardcover, 194 pages, $104.95

Interweaving nuanced discussions of politics, visuality, and gender, Director of Humanities and Sciences Rachel Schreiber uncovers the complex ways that gender figures into the graphic satire created by artists for the New York-based socialist journal, the Masses. This exceptional magazine was published between 1911 and 1917, during an unusually radical decade in American history and featured cartoons drawn by artists of the Ashcan School and others, addressing questions of politics, gender, labor, and class. Rather than viewing art from the Masses primarily in terms of its critical social stances or aesthetic choices, however, this study uses these images to open up new ways of understanding the complexity of early-20th-century viewpoints.