The relationship between Chouinard and Walt Disney runs deeper than most people know. Disney hired a Chouinard teacher named Donald Graham to teach more formal drawing classes on his studio property. He sent his animators—including some of the men who would become known as Disney's Nine Old Men—to study at Chouinard. When Nelbert Chouinard suffered a stroke in the early 1950s and could no longer run the school, it was Disney who stepped in financially and administratively to keep it alive. He did so, he said, out of gratitude: the school had helped train the talent that made his studio possible. The arrangement was unusual—a major entertainment corporation quietly subsidizing an independent art school—and it set the stage for what came next.

Look down the roster of Chouinard graduates and the breadth becomes almost dizzying. Chuck Jones, who gave Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck their defining personalities, studied here. So did Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, two of Disney's Nine Old Men, the animators who set the standard for character movement in American film. Edith Head, the costume designer who won eight Academy Awards—more than any other woman in Oscar history—trained at Chouinard. So did Ed Ruscha, who became one of the most influential painters of the late twentieth century. The school also produced animators who went to Warner Bros. and shaped Looney Tunes, costume designers who dressed stars across decades of Hollywood, and graphic designers whose work became part of the American visual landscape.

By the early 1960s, Disney was thinking bigger. He envisioned not just saving Chouinard but expanding it into a comprehensive institution he called a "City of the Arts"—a place where every creative discipline could exist under one roof, feeding and challenging each other. In 1961, he and his brother Roy guided the merger of Chouinard with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to create the California Institute of the Arts. Chouinard continued operating in its original form until 1970, when the new CalArts campus opened in Valencia. The school that Nelbert Chouinard built from nothing was folded into something larger—transformed by the same entertainment industry it had helped create.

Nelbert Chouinard died in 1969, the year before her school officially closed. The building in Westlake is gone. But the Chouinard Foundation has worked to keep the name alive, mounting exhibitions and archiving the school's history. In 2013, a documentary called Curly recounted the school's life through interviews with alumni including Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, and Peter Shire. And at CalArts, the lineage is acknowledged explicitly—the school's own history traces itself back to the institution a woman from Minnesota built from nothing on the West Coast in 1921, when the idea seemed audacious enough to be worth trying.