Frederick Meyer founded the School of the California Guild of Arts and Crafts in 1907, in the middle of a movement that was itself a protest. The Arts and Crafts movement had swept from England to America as a rejection of industrial mass production - a belief that human hands making beautiful things was not just an aesthetic preference but a moral stance. Meyer set up shop in Berkeley's Studio Building at 2045 Shattuck Avenue, and the philosophy attracted those forty-three initial students. The school was renamed California School of Arts and Crafts the following year. By 1910, it had outgrown its first home and moved into the former Berkeley High School building on Allston Way. The migration pattern was set early: the school would always be chasing space large enough for its ambitions.

In 1922, the school moved to a historic estate in Oakland, where it would remain for a century. The Oakland campus became the home of the physical arts - glass, jewelry, metalwork, printmaking, painting, sculpture, ceramics. These were studios that needed kilns and presses and ventilation, the infrastructure of making things by hand. In 1936, the institution became the California College of Arts and Crafts, and by 1940 it had established a Master of Fine Arts program. But the gravitational pull of San Francisco was strong. In the 1980s, the college began renting spaces across the bay, and in 1996 it converted a former Greyhound bus maintenance building in the city's Design District into a second campus. The repurposing felt apt: a building that once serviced machines now housed people learning to create without them.

In 2003, under president Michael S. Roth, the school dropped "Crafts" from its name, becoming simply the California College of the Arts. The change reflected the broadening of its programs into architecture, design, film, and writing - disciplines that the founders might not have recognized but that shared the same impulse toward making. The Oakland campus closed in 2022, its operations consolidated into San Francisco. Clifton Hall, one of the Oakland dormitories, was purchased by the city for public housing - a second life that the building's architects probably never imagined. In fall 2024, the San Francisco campus completed an expansion designed by Studio Gang, adding 82,300 square feet of new space for teaching and exhibition. The timing was cruel: the college was growing its physical footprint just as its financial foundations were crumbling.

In 2025, Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang stepped in with a matching gift, doubling the $22.5 million already raised in donations and allowing CCA to fill its budget shortfall. For a moment, the crisis seemed averted. But the underlying arithmetic had not changed. Art school tuition is high, enrollment in specialized degree programs was falling nationwide, and CCA was no exception. By January 2026, CCA president David Howse announced the end: the college would close after the 2026-2027 academic year. Vanderbilt University purchased the campus, planning to launch San Francisco-based academic programs beginning in 2027-2028. The building that Greyhound built, that CCA remade, would be remade again. The Arts and Crafts movement had argued that the act of making was inseparable from the maker. CCA's closure tests that idea - whether the creative culture it cultivated for 120 years can survive the loss of the institution that sustained it.