Overview

Initially founded as a major in performance art and video, New Genres quickly expanded to also encompass site specificity, social practices, and other trans-disciplinary media and approaches.

The courses of the New Genres program of San Francisco Art Institute are post-studio laboratories for experimentation and discovery, in which students are challenged to respond to society and culture by identifying the best means of expression for each individual work. Dialogue and discussion are key tools in the advancement of ideas that become manifest in the form of the work.

Program Learning Outcomes

• Students engage a broad cross section of local, national, and international artists, scholars, and communities in mutual exploration of art, and the roles, responsibilities, and integrity of art and the artist in society.

• Students gain the ability to think critically and develop creatively as a result ongoing, intensive critiques.

• Students develop working methods that reflect their individual personalities within the framework of contemporary practice and dialogue.

• Students gain the ability to conceive of works through interdisciplinary thinking and production, promoting non-media specific approaches to artistic practice.

• Students gain the ability to demonstrate some historical and theoretical understanding of relevant practices as they pertain to the student’s work, and develop the ability to utilize this knowledge as part of a studio practice.

• Students gain the ability to research and generate conceptual ideas and then go on to connect these ideas to a material practice.

• Students gain the ability to identify the most suitable form for one’s ideas. Mastery in this form is expected.

• Students gain the ability to take conceptual risks.

• Students gain the ability to understand and articulate the conceptual basis of the work in terms of content, methodology, and intended audience.