When you step into the space housing SFAI’s archive, the first thing you see is a wall displaying a selection of artifacts and photos. Among them are a massive wooden sign for the California School of Fine Arts; a photograph of the school’s first location in the Mark Hopkins Mansion on Nob Hill; a large-scale photo of a life drawing class taught by Richard Diebenkorn in 1948; a Spanish tile from the courtyard fountain; and scrawled on a tattered placard, "Give SFAI To The Students."

Mike Kelley is ten years gone. He was a known Catholic apostate, and sometimes his jovial irreverence carried the shy sting of the once-bitten. This falling out of faith is relevant to his practice only because Kelley found it hard to stay between the lines, no matter which way they were drawn. From this, transgression became habit; memory and conspiracy became material spaces to render. Focusing on Kelley's "Educational Complex," and on the artist's preoccupation with the McMartin Preschool child abuse scandal, Anthony Strain examines the Kelley style of eclecticism and how it relates to leaving expectations behind, and finding the taboo in the ordinary.

To outsiders the place looked like a hippie colony, a place full of longhairs and dogs, children running free, and hand-held video cameras recording it all. Inside, it was a place of possibility. Although there were recognizable classes, the motivating idea was to create more informal spaces where artist teachers and their students discussed ideas and developed projects, most outside the traditional frameworks of art-making, projects that aimed to question the very institutional construction of art itself.