San Francisco Art Institute was at the forefront of recognizing the shift that occurred in the field of contemporary art in the late 1960s and ‘70s involving conceptual art, land-art, performance, installation art, and video. This shift marked an expanded vocabulary of artmaking that was no longer based on mediums, but was a hybrid of many practices. The New Genres Department was founded to address this expansion in contemporary art. Just as Ansel Adams and Minor White established fine art photography at SFAI in the 1940s, pioneer video/conceptual/performance artist Howard Fried, then a faculty member in the Sculpture Department, was instrumental in the establishment of the New Genres Department. In the early years of the department, the pedagogical foundation and language for teaching these new forms were laid. Teaching was rooted in the belief and philosophy that social dialogue and rigorous critiques were the best route to engage in meaning, execution, and intentions in the making of a work.