The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) is a private art school in Santa Clarita, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the US created specifically for students of both the visual and performing arts. It offers Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Fine Arts, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees. It is located about 30 miles (48 km) northwest of downtown Los Angeles.
The school was first envisioned by many benefactors in the early 1960s including Nelbert Chouinard, Walt Disney, Lulu Von Hagen, and Thornton Ladd.
History
CalArts was originally formed in 1961, as a merger of the Chouinard Art Institute (founded 1921) and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music (founded 1883). Both of the formerly existing institutions were going through financial difficulties, and the founder of the Art Institute, Nelbert Chouinard, was terminally ill. Walt Disney was longtime friends with both Chouinard and Lulu May Von Hagen, the chair of the Conservatory, and discovered and trained many of his studio's artists at the two schools (including Mary Blair, Maurice Noble, and some of the Nine Old Men, among others). To keep the educational mission of the schools alive, the merger and expansion of the two institutions was coordinated, a process which continued after Walt's death in 1966. Joining him in this effort were his brother Roy O. Disney, Nelbert Chouinard, Lulu May Von Hagen and Thornton Ladd (Ladd & Kelsey, Architects). John Vincent and Mitchell Wilder were early considerations of the president of the new organization.
Without Walt, the remaining founders assembled a team and planned on creating CalArts as a school that was a destination, like Disneyland, to be a feeder school for the various arts industries. To lead this project, they appointed Robert W. Corrigan as the first president of the institute.
The original board of trustees at CalArts included Nelbert Chouinard, Lulu May Von Hagen, Harrison Price, Royal Clark, Robert W. Corrigan, Roy E. Disney, Roy O. Disney, film producer Z. Wayne Griffin, H. R. Haldeman, Ralph Hetzel (then vice president of Motion Picture Association of America), Chuck Jones, Ronald Miller, Millard Sheets, attorney Maynard Toll, attorney Luther Reese Marr, bank executive G. Robert Truex Jr., Jerry Wexler, Meredith Willson, Peter McBean and Scott Newhall (descendants of Henry Newhall), Mrs. Roswell Gilpatric, and Mrs. J. L. Hurschler.
In 1965, the Alumni Association was founded as a separate organization. The 12 founding board of directors members were Mary Costa, Edith Head, Gale Storm, Marc Davis, Tony Duquette, Harold Grieve, John Hench, Chuck Jones, Henry Mancini, Marty Paich, Nelson Riddle, and Millard Sheets.
The ground-breaking for CalArts' current campus took place on May 3, 1969, as part of the Master Plan for a new planned community in the Santa Clarita Valley of Los Angeles. However, construction of the new campus was hampered by torrential rains, labor shortages, and the Sylmar Earthquake in 1971. As a result, the first combined campus for the Institute started at the former Villa Cabrini Academy (now the home of Woodbury University) in July 1970. CalArts moved to its new campus in Valencia, now part of the city of Santa Clarita, California, in November 1971.
Founding CalArts president Corrigan, formerly the founding dean of the School of Arts at New York University, fired almost all the artists who taught at Chouinard and the Conservatory in his attempt to remake CalArts into his new vision. Only four Chouinard faculty members went on to teach at CalArts, including Louis Danziger, Emerson Woelffer, Matsumi Kanemitsu, and Paul McGuire. He appointed fellow academic Herbert Blau to be the founding dean of the School of Theatre and Dance, and serve as the institute's first Provost. Blau and Corrigan then hired other academics to found the original academic areas, including Mel Powell (dean of the School of Music), Paul Brach (dean of the School of Art), Alexander Mackendrick (dean of the School of Film), Maurice R. Stein (director of Critical Studies), and Richard Farson (dean of the School of Design), as well as other influential faculty such as Stephan von Huene, Allan Kaprow, Bella Lewitzky, Michael Asher, Jules Engel, John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Ravi Shankar, Max Kozloff, Miriam Shapiro, Douglas Huebler, Morton Subotnick, Norman M. Klein, and Nam June Paik, most of whom came from a counterculture and avant garde perspective.
Corrigan held his position until 1972, when he was fired and replaced by then board member William S. Lund, Walt Disney's son-in-law, as the Institute approached insolvency. The period between 1972 and 1975 was extremely unstable financially, and Lund had to make significant operational reductions, including layoffs, reducing all faculty contracts to one-year, pausing degree programs, eliminating the School of Design, and folding degree programs into other Schools in order to keep the Institute alive.
In 1975, Robert J. Fitzpatrick was appointed president of CalArts. During his presidency, the Institute grew its enrollment and stabilized, renewed its accreditation, and added new programs for which it is known globally today, including Character Animation and Jazz. While President, Fitzpatrick also served as the director of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival. He then founded the Los Angeles Festival, which grew directly out of the proceeds of the 1984 Olympic Games. After 1984, it was largely John Orders, assistant to the president/chief of staff, who coordinated the institute's operations in partnership with the other leaders. In 1987, Fitzpatrick resigned as president to take the position as head of EuroDisney (now Disneyland Paris) in Paris, France.
During the search for a President from 1987–1988, Nicholas England, the then dean of the School of Music, served as Acting President. In the fall of 1988, Steven D. Lavine, then the Assistant Program Director for the Arts and Humanities of the Rockefeller Foundation, was appointed president. By the time Lavine started his tenure, CalArts had developed a structural deficit of 16%, and during his time in office, Lavine grew enrollment and increased tuition significantly while remaining within the existing square footage of the campus. In 2003, he added the Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theatre, part of the Los Angeles Music Center's new Walt Disney Concert Hall project, to the operations of the Institute.
Seven years into his tenure, President Lavine navigated the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, which closed the main building in Valencia at the start of the spring semester. Classes were held in rental party tents on the 60 acre grounds, and alternate teaching locations were scattered miles apart around Los Angeles County. The building was "red tagged" and not allowed to be used until millions of dollars of repairs were performed. Under the advisement of James Haire of American Conservatory Theater, Lavine was able to allocate emergency funding from Federal Emergency Management Agency. This funding provided the bulk of the financial assistance for structural repairs due to seismic activity. Additionally, private donations supported aesthetic renovations of curated spaces in the building. CalArts reopened the doors to its Valencia campus in the fall 1994 semester.
On June 24, 2015, Lavine announced he would step down as president in May 2017, after 29 years in the position. After an 18-month search (which included over 500 candidates), Board Chair Tim Disney and the CalArts board of trustees announced on December 13, 2016, that Ravi S. Rajan, then the dean of the School of the Arts at the State University of New York at Purchase, was unanimously selected as president to begin in June 2017.
Over the years, the institute has developed experimental interdisciplinary laboratories through extramural funding such as the CHANEL Center for Artists and Technology, the Center for Integrated Media, and the Cotsen Center for Puppetry.
Academics CalArts offers various undergraduate and graduate degrees in programs that are related to and combine music, art, dance, film, animation, theater, and writing. Students receive intensive professional training in an area of their creative aspirations without being cast into a rigid pattern. The institute's overall focus is on experimental, multidisciplinary, contemporary arts practices, and its stated mission is to enable the professional artists of tomorrow, artists who will transform the world through artistic practice. With these goals in place, the Institute encourages students to recognize the complexity of political, social, and aesthetic questions and to respond to them with informed, independent judgment.
Admission Every program within the Institute requires that applicants send in an artist's statement, along with a portfolio or audition to be considered for admission. The institute has never required an applicant's SAT or other test scores, and does not consider an applicant's GPA as part of the admission process without the consent of the applicant .
201920182017Applicants4,0334,4312,265Admits1,2381,200545Admission rate30.7%27.1%24.1%Enrolled529523235
Conception and foundation The initial concept behind CalArts' interdisciplinary approach came from Richard Wagner's idea of Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork"), of which Walt Disney himself was fond and explored in a variety of forms, beginning with his own studio, then later in the incorporation of CalArts. He began with the film Fantasia (1940), where animators, dancers, composers, and artists alike collaborated. In 1952, Walt Disney Imagineering was founded, where Disney formed a team of artists including Herbert Ryman, Ken O'Brien, Collin Campbell, Marc Davis, Al Bertino, Wathel Rogers, Mary Blair, T. Hee, Blaine Gibson, Xavier Atencio, Claude Coats, and Yale Gracey. He believed that the same concept that developed WDI could also be applied to a university setting, where art students of different media would be exposed to and explore a wide range of creative directions.
Campus life
Notable facilities
A113
A113 is a classroom at CalArts where the character animation program (then called the Disney animation program) was originally founded. Many CalArts alumni have inserted references to it in their works (not just animation) as an homage to this classroom and to CalArts.
Downtown Los Angeles
In 2003, CalArts built a theater and art gallery in downtown Los Angeles called REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater as part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in the Los Angeles Music Center.
John Baldessari Art Studios In 2013, CalArts opened its John Baldessari Art Studios, which cost $3.1 million to build, and features approximately 7,000 square feet of space for MFA Art students and program courses. In addition to debt, funding for the studios was partially raised by the sale of artwork donated by School of Art alumni, for whom each studio was then named.David Ng (November 29, 2013), CalArts names new art studio building after John Baldessari Los Angeles Times.
Notable people
CalArts' notable current and former faculty members include the artists John Baldessari, Judy Chicago, Charles Gaines, Martin Kersels, Thomas Lawson, Miriam Schapiro, and Allan Kaprow. The faculty in theatre arts has included Fran Bennett, Lee Breuer, Ron Cephas Jones, Lew Palter, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Janie Geiser. The faculty in dance has included Donald Byrd, Donald McKayle, Mia Slavenska, Rebecca Wright, George de la Peña and Bella Lewitzky. The faculty in music has included John Bergamo.
Notable alumni include artists Nayland Blake, Raven Chacon, Eric Fischl, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Mike Kelley, Matt Mullican, and Catherine Opie and animator Siranudh Scott.