Six months after the California College of the Arts (CCA) announced it will shut down next year and sell its campus to Nashville-based Vanderbilt University, the latter has revealed plans to keep the arts central to the Bay Area campus, with significant support from one of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Following a $75m donation from the family of Nvidia founder Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang and his wife Lori Huang, Vanderbilt plans to open its San Francisco campus in 2027 with the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design as its flagship school.
“Technology expands what we can build. Art and design determine why we build it. Together they shape civilisation,” Jensen Huang said in a statement. “We are delighted to partner with Vanderbilt University to cultivate the next generation of creators and help San Francisco remain one of the world’s great centers of creativity, innovation and culture.”
The CCA is the only remaining nonprofit art-and-design school in Northern California, so Vanderbilt’s plans will likely come as a relief to aspiring artists, designers and architects in the Bay Area, as well as those looking for teaching jobs to supplement their creative practices. The university, incidentally, is currently searching for a founding dean to lead the new college.
“This college, together with additional academic programming under development, will prepare creative leaders to shape culture, industries and communities in San Francisco’s thriving economy, nationally and around the world,” Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, said in a statement. “In partnership with the city and surrounding community, we will blend Vanderbilt’s distinctive excellence with San Francisco’s distinctive excellence to build something truly remarkable, together.”
In honour of the CCA’s 120-year legacy, Vanderbilt will create the California College of the Arts Institute at Vanderbilt University, which will house the ongoing activities of its main exhibition venue the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, maintain the CCA’s archives, programme events for CCA alumni and the Bay Area cultural community, and offer residencies and fellowships to artists, scholar, designers, architects, curators and others.
The California College of the Arts campus in San Francisco, future site of Vanderbilt University's Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang College of Art, Architecture and Design Courtesy Vanderbilt University
Prior to announcing its closure and the sale of its property, CCA had struggled with falling enrollment and a $20m deficit. It had recently consolidated operations at its San Francisco campus (revamped and expanded at a cost of $97.5m) and ceased activities at its Oakland campus, which was also sold to Vanderbilt as part of the agreement.
Fewer than 500 students are expected to graduate from CCA before it closes in 2027; a total of 207 undergraduate and 117 graduate students enrolled at the school last autumn, according to KQED. In 2019, the college’s enrollment peaked at around 1,800 full-time students. Notable CCA alumni include the artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Robert Arneson, Bernice Bing, Hank Willis Thomas and Jules de Balincourt.
The CCA is not the Bay Area’s only storied art school undergoing a change in ownership, name and structure. The San Francisco Art Institute closed in 2022 after filing for bankruptcy amid similar deficit and enrolment problems. That school—whose architecturally significant campus is home to an important Diego Rivera mural valued at $50m—was acquired by Laurene Powell Jobs’s nonprofit in 2024 and will reopen as the California Academy of Studio Arts at a future date.
Jensen Huang is the founder, president and chief executive of Nvidia, the Santa Clara-headquartered company whose computer chips have been essential building blocks to the artificial intelligence boom. As of this writing, according to Forbes, Huang's net worth is $178.9bn, making him the seventh-richest person in the world. On 17 July, a Tom Ford leather jacket that had belonged to Huang was offered in a single-lot online auction at Sotheby's, where it set off a bidding war among 45 would-be buyers and eventually sold for $960,000 (including fees), 16 times its high estimate.
In addition to the $75m gift from the Huangs, Vanderbilt has raised more than $25m additional commitments to establish the new art, architecture and design college, and support other academic programmes. The university expects its San Francisco campus will open to students in the autumn of 2027, pending regulatory approval and other administrative steps. The highly-ranked, Nashville-based university is currently pursuing multiple expansions, including a campus in New York City that will open to undergraduates this autumn, a graduate campus in development in West Palm Beach, Florida, and a quantum computing institute planned for Chattanooga, Tennessee.
