Lindsey White: What? Is? Higher? Arts? Education?

On the occasion of the second printing of What? Is? Art?, by Lindsey White and Anonymous, CCA's Graduate Fine Art Department and Wattis Institute host a talk and conversation with the local artist and educator alongside Sarah Hotchkiss, local writer, artist, and Senior Associate Editor at KQED's art and culture desk. What? Is? Art? (Colpa Press, 2024) is a collection of photographs made on the pandemic-empty campus of the San Francisco Art Institute, where White taught for over a decade as an Adjunct, Assistant, and Associate Professor and Photography Department Chair. The final class of SFAI art students graduated in the summer of 2022 and the institution promptly closed. SFAI was one of the last exclusively fine arts schools in the United States, and its closure reflects not only the transitional moment such schools face, but also their fight for survival. What? Is? Art? Also includes writings by nine professors who teach in private art schools or public art departments across the country. The texts and images memorialize and contemplate the complexity of arts education in this protracted moment of instability while cementing the importance of building collective support systems within institutions.

Speaker Bio: Lindsey White

Lindsey White is an artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. She has exhibited at venues such as SFMOMA; San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen; Bolinas Museum, CA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; ACME, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York; The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Oregon; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; Locust Projects, Miami; San Francisco International Airport Museum; and Museum Bärengasse, Zurich. White was awarded SFMOMA's 2017 SECA Award and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California, and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley. White taught in the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute from 2010, serving as Department Chair from 2015 to 2022, before serving as Director of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. White was a co-founder of the para-curatorial experiment Will Brown, which realized projects with institutions such as U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; di Rosa, Napa; Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University; and KADIST, San Francisco. White’s projects have been featured in the New York Times, Frieze, Art Forum, The New Yorker, KQED Arts, SF Chronicle, and Contemporary Art Daily. Her book, What? Is?Art? was recently released by Colpa Press.

Speaker Bio: Sarah Hotchkiss

Sarah Hotchkiss is a writer and artist living in San Francisco. She is the senior associate editor for the arts and culture desk at KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR and PBS affiliate. In this role, she covers visual art, film, museums, labor issues in the arts, and — her favorite — art happenings in unexpected places. She has written essays and reviews for Art in America, The Creative Independent, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Art Practical and Squarecylinder. In 2019, she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation grant for visual art journalism. And in 2020, she received a Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California award for excellence in arts and culture reporting. From 2020 to 2023, she co-organized the alternative exhibition space Premiere Jr., commissioning new work from Bay Area artists for a 6-by-12-foot billboard in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood. She holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and regularly exhibits her own artwork.

Host or Publisher California College of the Arts