Clyfford Still as a Teacher

In this video from the Clyfford Still Museum’s ground-floor storyviewers, former Still student Eileen Griffith, painter John DiPaolo, and SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra discuss the artist’s style and influence as an educator. Clyfford Still taught painting at Washington State College (now Washington State University), where he earned his own Master of Arts in Fine Arts degree in 1935; the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he met fellow faculty member Mark Rothko in 1943; and the School of Art at the Richmond Professional Institute of the College of William & Mary (now Virginia Commonwealth University). He was also a guest instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder during the summer of 1960, and in 1937 co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony, a small artists’ residency that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting life on the Colville Indian Reservation over the course of four summers.