BFATextiles

Explore the interdisciplinary potential of textiles and material thinking

One of the oldest aesthetic traditions in the world, textiles are currently on the cutting edge of contemporary art practice and critical inquiry. Artists working in interdisciplinary zones are picking up cloth and thread to incorporate the discipline’s creative and conceptual potential.

Join an internationally recognized program

With a reputation for cutting-edge work, our internationally recognized Textiles program teaches you to think beyond the crafted object. Compared to other programs in the United States, our courses are topic-driven, designed to build technical skill, while promoting critical thinking, research, and problem-solving. Students are encouraged to investigate relevant issues such as the social and environmental implications of mass production, analyze the gendering of work, and interrogate systemic forms of oppression. Contemporary critical race theory, gender theory, queer theory, and slow methodologies aid in our inquiry to understand the shape of an innovative and relevant textiles practice today.

Our new facilities

The Textiles program offered its first courses in our beautiful new facilities at 350 Kansas Street in San Francisco in fall 2022. The facilities are a 10-minute walk from the main CCA building and immediately adjacent to the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. The 4,700-square-foot open space includes high ceilings with light streaming from multiple skylights, weaving and print studios, a dye lab, and a classroom.

Encouraging open dialogue and a sense of community

Our Textiles program is known for its close-knit community and for its collegial and mutually supportive learning environment. The Textiles studios are a hive of activity in which students, faculty, and staff engage in critical conversations around textile history, theory, and practice. Lively lectures, discussions, and critiques within the classroom provide the intellectual backbone to our making-intensive curriculum.

Printing meaning through imagery and pattern

Our Print Studio and Dye Lab are outfitted with individual print stations, a production print table, a large vacuum exposure unit, and dye facilities. Print courses such as Wet + Wild and Print Witchery delve into the painterly qualities of dye on cloth and the use of visual metaphor to create meaning.

Instruction in technical skills includes natural and chemical dye technologies; hand, screen, and digital printing; engineered and repeat design; photo- and computer-generated imaging; and the complexities of screenprinted repeat patterns for applications in fine arts, fashion, and interior design. View rotating printing courses.

Josh Faught’s practice combines textiles, pop cultural detritus, and archival materials to address the relationships between language, community, and constructions of identity. His work has recently appeared in exhibitions at The Wattis Center for Contemporary Art, Kendall Koppe Gallery, the Moody Center for the Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the New Museum, Sadie Coles HQ, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Faught’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Art in America, among other journals and publications. Faught is the recipient of the 2009 Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award, the 2011 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, the 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award (SECA), the 2016 Artadia Award, the 2016 Eureka Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 2022.