Where Creativity Meets Community

Shinnosuke Nomura (BFA Architecture 2025) constructs an intricate bamboo structure, Nathan Sheu (BFA Furniture 2024) crafts a chair from fog and lasers, and Jingyi Yang’s (BFA Fashion Design 2025) sculptural dress has a runway-stopping moment. You’ll see these moments and more as you’re riding the bus, walking around San Francisco, or taking BART. At a time when the market is dominated by advertisements by AI and tech companies, CCA is showing—not telling—the college’s real impact through our community’s real work. The college’s nearly 120-year legacy is found in these creative intersections between disciplines, industries, and possibilities, or the edge effect.

The edge effect, or where “x” meets “y”

Edge effects describe what happens when different habitats meet at boundaries, known as ecotones, and influence both the interactions between them and the environments themselves. Like a forest meeting a wetland, when painting meets artificial intelligence or interior design meets jewelry, ideas form into something entirely new.

CCA isn’t just a place where interdisciplinary education happens in theory, but is deeply embedded in our practices. Here, art historians are ecologists, jewelry designers are theorists, and designers are ethicists. Our campaign centers on this meeting of the minds and making, which can only happen here.

From the studio to the streets

We’re taking these edge effects beyond campus to see what happens when our creativity is amplified within our local community. Our out-of-home advertising campaign includes placements in BART station posters, street pole banners, wild postings, and Muni bus sides across San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley.

Featured students

Shane Chavez (MArch Architecture 2025)

Chavez proposes an “architectural exchange” as a solution for water supply challenges in Arizona’s Rio Verde Foothills. In this concept, an isolated, single-family water conservation method becomes a community-based framework where water, land, and buildings come together.

Grace Jin (MFA Fine Arts 2026)

Satellite Baby Sutra is a nine-panel folding screen made of oil, gold ink, incense, joss, indigo-dyed mulberry paper on canvas. It’s a reimagined matrilineal heirloom based on an 11-foot embroidery piece from her grandmother. Jin’s version features family, friends, and collaborators.

Jingyi Yang (BFA Fashion Design 2025)

Yang’s senior thesis collection Frictional Identities debuted at CCA’s annual fashion show. Yang used digital fabrication, 3D techniques, and sculptural draping to evoke psychological and visual complexity through wearable garments.

Boya Wang (MAAD Advanced Architectural Design 2025)

Four students included Wang participated in an advanced research residency at Autodesk’s San Francisco Technology Center as part of the yearlong Robotic Craft course, exploring the intersection of design, robotics, and materiality.

Shinnosuke Nomura (BArch Architecture 2025)

Nomura and collaborators produced Whisked Away Tea Pavilion in the Computational Bamboo course, where students explore novel methods for collaborating with robots to fabricate and assemble structures made out of bamboo.

Nathan Sheu (BFA Furniture 2024)

Nathan Sheu’s (BFA Furniture 2024) The Laser Chair, blends digital technology with traditional craftsmanship. Fabricated with precision using a laser cutter, the acrylic components framing the fog and the base were meticulously sized to host the necessary elements.

Iyari Heredia Zenteno’s (BFA Graphic Design 2025)

Design Aktive, Zenteno’s senior thesis project, features a motion-sensor cursor in the form of a mini molcajete that functions like a theremin through two ultrasonic sensors embedded inside of it. When the user’s hands are positioned about an inch above the sensors, the left hand controls the amplitude, while the right hand controls the frequency, both working simultaneously to control the cursor.

Yue Xiang (MFA Fine Arts 2024)

Xiang works across installation, sculpture, film, and performance. Their practice questions how bodies transform materials through time, and labor and how memories live in this world and beyond. Other themes Xiang explores include grieving rituals, language, translation, queer aesthetics and objecthood.

Rosemary McDermott (MFA Fine Arts 2025)

When the paint meets the canvas, McDermott’s (MFA Fine Arts 2025) lets her hand take the lead. The result? “Vertical landscapes” that counter the horizontal landscape tradition of Western landscape painting.

Farzad Kargaran, Thomas Euyang, and Han Ping Gabriel Tan (MFA Design 2024)

Cutis Anserina by Farzad Kargaran, Thomas Euyang, and Han Ping Gabriel Tan (MFA Design 2024) was designed for the Future Resonance exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In this tactile and audio work, visitors lie inside a small chamber constructed from biodynamic material, where sound and vibrations elicit goosebumps.

Willow (MFA Fine Arts 2024)

Willow is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and poet whose work is mainly based on a visual language system composed of text and image, with the metaphorical structure of adrift and anchor, exploring and expressing the repetition of spaces and layers in experience.

Chibuzor Darl-Uzu (MFA Design 2025)

Darl-Uzu’s Soft Matter won a $10,000 prize and the Community Impact Award from the Center for Art and Public Life. Soft Matter is a design intervention that rethinks the way materials can foster empathy, comfort, and human agency. By repurposing packaging beans, bubble wrap, scrap foam, and other waste materials, this project challenges the rigid design practices that often shape public spaces.