Events & Exhibitions
CCA’s dynamic public programming brings art, architecture, design, writing, and the world of ideas to life through events, lectures, exhibitions, and more.
Join us
All of CCA’s lectures, symposiums, and workshops are free, offering opportunities for students and the public to engage with cultural topics and creative practices through the work and ideas of award-winning artists, designers, authors, scholars, and alumni.
Featured events and programs
Art in action
Explore how democracy, creative activism, and voter advocacy intersect through Creative Citizens in Action’s (CCA@CCA) annual series of public programs, which span the disciplines of art, design, architecture, and writing.
Creative Citizens Series
Enjoy curated new work by our community of students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in our contemporary galleries. Exhibitions are open to all and always free.
Current exhibitions
Recognitions / 认 • 知, a solo exhibition by Christine Wong Yap, at the new CCA Campus Gallery in Blattner Hall.
Discover on-campus experiences
Enjoy the future of art and design all year-long in CCA’s mix of campus galleries and presentation spaces. Visitors will find new work by students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in curated venues that embrace diverse perspectives and a range of contemporary approaches. Offering our students the unique opportunity to present their work and expand their practice in a professional setting, the campus galleries are also a place for our community of makers and the public to connect across contemporary art and design. Plan a visit, today.
Meet the voices of tomorrow
CCA’s graduating student showcases, presented by class year, are digital time capsules of capstone projects and culminating work.
Celebrating the makers of 2024
Featuring work by graduating students, the 2024 Showcase represents the diversity of practice across CCA’s Architecture, Design, Fine Arts, and Humanities & Sciences divisions. Navigate the full showcase experience on Portal, and check out the Deans' Spotlight collection of outstanding projects from each academic division.
Creative Citizens in Action
The Creative Citizens in Action (CCA@CCA) initiative provides important resources to the CCA community to power dialogue and making related to creative activism. The connected programming explores art, democratic engagement, and current affairs through public events, exhibitions, grant opportunities, voting resources, and connections to the classroom.
CCA@CCA is overseen by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department in partnership with Student Affairs, as well as libraries, academic divisions, communications, and faculty.
Explore our stories
Rewind Review Respond
Rewind Review Respond (RRR) is an online forum where CCA students write about recent events and the ideas that affect their practice, communities, and fields of study. Through writing, videos, and interviews, RRR is an opportunity to debrief on a lecture, panel, screening, or roundtable and to dive deeper into ideas discussed.
RRR is organized by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department and led by a team of student editors, writers, and designers.
Exhibitions at CCA
@ccaexhibitions
Aug. 22, 2024
"Balbi firmly stated that a museum should be part of the process of enabling and supporting artists, not just the final destination to display and acquire the end product. The purpose of a museum is to support, help, and uplift artists. Museums must be invested in creating systems to lend money, time, space, communication, and other resources to artists."
“Museums in Evolution: Lorenzo Balbi's Approach to Sustainable Arts Ecosystems,” by Evelynn Harra, is part of RRR’s coverage of the Materiality of Resistance Symposium, organized by the History of Art & Visual Culture program at California College of the Arts. Read the full article in RRR Volume 8 (link in bio).
The Symposium, which took place March 7-8, 2024, brought together scholars and artists from across the country, as well as CCA students, to explore material modes of resistance to the status quo in American art and visual culture. The Symposium offered a variety of events, including panels and lectures, workshops, performances, and two exhibitions of student artwork on view in the Nave and at the nearby Wattis Institute.
Evelynn Harra (MA Visual & Critical Studies 2024) has an interest in the visual culture of perception. Her research values the multiplicity of personal experience to deeper understand the visual art within our culture.
Aug. 21, 2024
Opening a week from today (8/28) at the CCA Campus Gallery: "Potrero Hill Perspectives: A Neighborhood’s Artistic Legacy."
"Potrero Hill Perspectives: A Neighborhood’s Artistic Legacy" features paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture from the 1920s-1980s by influential artists who lived and worked in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, alongside additional work by California-based artists who were influenced by its low rents, sunshine, views of the bay, to demonstrate the important role artists have played in defining and portraying the neighborhood that CCA calls home.
Featuring work by Robert Bechtle, Ruth Cravath, Charles Griffin Farr, Bob Hayes, Henri Marie-Rose, Charles Surendorf, Lionel Edwards, Frank Van Sloun, Pauline Vinson, Theodore Polos, and Marguerite Redman Dorgeloh.
On view: August 28–November 2, 2024
Opening reception: August 28, 5–7pm
Location: CCA Campus Gallery (1480 17th Street, San Francisco)
Gallery hours: Wednesday 11am–7pm, Thursday & Friday 11am–4pm
Free and open to the public
Image: Charles Surendorf, "House in San Francisco," 1939. Woodblock print, 13 x 16 inches, framed. Courtesy of the Potrero Hill Archives Project.
Aug. 17, 2024
Introducing this year's PLAySPACE (@ccaplayspace) Director, Giorgie O'Keeffe DePaolis!
Giorgie O'Keeffe DePaolis (they/them) is a second year graduate student in the @ccaviscrit program. O'Keeffe DePaolis recognizes creativity as a means to connect people, build relationships, and foster solidarity. Their curatorial debut in April 2024 showed them the potential for exhibitions to produce a gathering table for artists and amplify important local voices. O'Keeffe DePaolis collaborates with artists to display works that source inspiration from mythology, ancestry, memory, intimacy, mystery, and other alternative epistemologies.
Academically, their research investigates how visual aesthetics emerge from DIY art scenes in San Francisco, contextualized by the City's bohemianism and history of economic stress. Each of these pursuits is a part of a larger goal to cultivate joy and sincerity in a strangely changing world.
Their opening show, Long Lost, reconciles the work of past and present students, transforming the gallery into a homecoming venue. Learn more via the link in our bio.
Aug. 8, 2024
Reminder: CCA Faculty are invited to apply to receive $500–$1000 in grant support from CCA@CCA for fall 2024 course efforts tied to civic and democratic engagement. Application deadline: THIS MONDAY, AUGUST 12, 2024
The goal of this grant program is to support the implementation of small-scale, immediate, public-facing events, projects, or activations that aim to improve the learning experience and provide opportunities for students to practice creative activism. Projects require a public outcome that can be featured in the Creative Citizens Program Series as well as social media and online platforms.
In fall 2024, we are looking for projects related to voting and democratic engagement, timed in connection to the United States Presidential Election on November 5th. Activities are encouraged to take place before the election, but projects taking place later in the semester will still be considered as long as they are connected to democratic engagement.
In addition to events, grant funds have supported a number of book, zine, website, social media, and printing projects. Grant funds are not available for private class visits or programs that do not have a public outcome.
All faculty who are actively teaching at CCA in fall 2024 are invited to request funds. Faculty who have previously received CCA@CCA grants are eligible to apply again, but priority will be given to new applicants. Faculty are welcome to collaborate on a grant application and share the awarded funds between their classes.
More information and a link to the application are available via our linktree.
Image: George Pfau and Hannah Ireland, "Our Voice Our Votes," 2020. On view at the CCA Hubbell Street Galleries as part of the CCA@CCA Artwork Campaign, October 2020.
Find what’s next in our calendar of exhibitions and events