A friend of mine recently sent me an couple years-old advertisement for the Filmmaking Program at the San Francisco Art Institute, where we both attended. A typical ad one would find in an art journal or trade publication. He sent it to me because we’re both listed in a section entitled “MFA and BFA Degree Receipients (Selected 1970-2000):”
(Click on the above image for the complete advertisement).
But the fact that we made this short list of degree receipients (I wonder how many there have been over those 30 years) is only of passing interest. What’s interesting about the ad is that while my friend received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute, I didn’t even get a Bachelors at the place. In point of fact, I dropped out of the Institute about 12 units shy of graduating. So not only is my place on this list unwarranted, but they way they’ve organized it, one doesn’t really know if they “gave” me a BFA or an MFA.
Now, I’ve been known to stretch the truth of my college education on resumes and such, which is to say I usually list it like so:
Education
San Francisco Art Institute, Filmmaking
1988-1992
so that it sort of implies I graduated, but doesn’t explicitly state that I did. (In my defense, if the question came up, I told the truth, and have never tried to pass off a fake diploma.) But now I see that all these post-art school years, I’ve been underselling myself. Now if I could just get those pesky student loans I took out from that time to disappear in the same way that this degree has appeared, I’d be all set.
Why I dropped out of the Art Institute is a not-so-interesting story I really don’t want to go into at the moment. I don’t regret the time I spent there, I learned an incredible amount and not just about filmmaking, and met some very inspirational people, but in general I still have a lot of angst (for lack of a better word) about the place, though not about not finishing and getting my degree.
Actually, when I first enrolled, I never intended to stay long enough to get a degree, I just wanted to learn, and see amazing films, and be around people for whom film meant light and shadow captured on a strip of film that was run through a projector and sometimes produced meaning, something different from the packaged narratives I had been force-fed up till then. And so I went and studied and made films and eventually got close to finishing. But then, my interests changed, and the degree didn’t seem worth going through the motions for. And so I stopped going.
The image below is one I found online last week at the San Francisco Public Library’s Historical Photograph Collection, showing how the Art Institute looked in 1930 (when it was known as the California School of Fine Arts). Though there have been modern add-ons to the campus since then, it still looks almost exactly like this image, when looked at from this view. How many times did I enter the arched doorway at far left? (The school’s film and photography departments, when I was there, occupied this part of the campus).
