Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit art organization which hosts media art festivals, exhibitions, music events, software and electronics classes, a media lab, and a resident artist program. It is the only institution in San Francisco dedicated to art and technology.^[1]

Formation	2006
Founder	Josette Melchor
Headquarters	San Francisco
Executive Director	Barry Threw
Website	www.grayarea.org

History

Founding & Nonprofit Formation

Josette Melchor and Peter Hirshberg initially opened Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) in 2006,^[2] following a conversation about the lack of proper venues for the exhibition of new media and technology-based art works.^{[citation needed]} By 2008, the gallery had incorporated as a non-profit and was renamed the Gray Area Foundation for The Arts.

Tenderloin Location

In 2009 Gray Area relocated to 55 Taylor Street, as an anchor tenant in a three block redevelopment project to create an arts district in San Francisco's Tenderloin.^[3] This 8,000-square-foot location originally included an adult theater, bar and liquor store and was transformed into a gallery space with artist studios, new-media lab, café and artists' boutique.^[4] The property owner Jack Sumski invested more than $1M for improvements in the building to prepare the site for Gray Area.^[5][6] The space allowed Gray Area to expand its exhibition platform to include artist residencies, educational workshops, and symposiums.^[7] In this location, Gray Area served as part of a coalition of city agencies, arts organizations and community service providers attempting to revitalize a neighborhood that historically struggled with the effects of substance abuse, addiction, and poverty.^[8][9]

Market Street Location

Gray Area later moved to the Warfield Building at 923 Market Street, investing roughly $60,000 in renovations. They were ultimately forced to move due to competition for real estate in the mid-market neighborhood, following the city's payroll tax breaks incentivizing startups, restaurants and developers to move into the area.^[10]

Mission Location

In 2014 Gray Area moved to their present location at the historic Grand Theater at 2665 Mission Street.^[11] The organization renovated the theater, converting it from a vacant retail space into a performance space and cultural incubator.^[12] In 2019 Josette Melchor transitioned her role from Executive Director to board member, and Barry Threw assumed the role of Executive and Artistic Director. ^[1]

Gray Area Festival

Launched in 2015, the Gray Area Festival is the first International media arts festival in San Francisco. It normally features an art exhibition, daily talks and evening performances.

After the #ReviveTheGrand campaign, the first Gray Area Festival took place in 2015. With initial presentations by Jane Metcalfe, Michael Naimark, Golan Levin, Camille Utterback and night events by Shigeto, Alessandro Cortini, and others.

In 2016, the 2nd year of the Gray Area Festival focused on a prompt by Buckminster Fuller and a holistic approach to the arts. The event had the Refraction Exhibition.

In 2017, the 3rd year of the Gray Area Festival focused on the challenges to the optimism of the future.^{[citation needed]}

The Gray Area Festival returned in 2018 with a focus on Blockchain, Distributed Systems and Art as the main theme. The event opened with the Distributed Systems exhibition curated by Barry Threw. The next two days, July 27–28, they hosted daytime talks around the festival theme with night-time audiovisual performances.^[13][14]

The Gray Area Festival 2019 focused on experiences including augmented reality, virtual reality and XR. Curated by Barry Threw, the 2019 festival centered around the Experiential Space Research Lab, ISM Hexadrome and a robotic exoskeleton performance, Inferno. ^{[15][16][17][18]}

The 2020 Gray Area Festival was held virtually through the coronavirus pandemic as the Gray Area Festival 2020 "Radical Simulation". Professor D. Fox Harrell from MIT and Ruha Benjamin keynoted the festival.^[19] The festival featured Anti-Gone by Theo Triantafyllidis, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Phazero, LaTurbo Avedon, Lawrence Lek, Morehshin Allahyari and Stephanie Dinkins.^[20][21]

The 2021 edition of Gray Area Festival was titled "Worlding Protocol", and featured McKenzie Wark as a keynote speaker.^[1]

Programs

Education

Gray Area hosts an ongoing series workshops and classes covering topics such as creative coding, decentralization of data, and foundation skills for producing technology driven artworks.^[22]

Art Exhibitions

Gray Area has hosted several notable art exhibitions. In 2016 they mounted DeepDream: The Art of Neural Networks, representing the first exhibition of art created by Generative Adversarial Networks, a form of artificial intelligence. In 2018 they launched Distributed Systems, featuring NFT and blockchain art, preceding the historic sales and public interest in the technology of 2021. In 2023 they hosted TECHS-MECHS, a solo show by celebrated Mexican-Canadian new media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Located within the predominantly Latino Mission district, the exhibition challenged the stereotype of "Mexican Art" by paying homage to Mexico's lesser known tradition of experimentation within technology and culture.^[1]

Artist residency

The first five resident artists (Alphonzo Solorzano, Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander, Miles Stemper and Daniel Massey) moved into the space in July 2009. In 2010, three of these resident artists remained (Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander and Daniel Massey).^[23]

Gray Area Incubator

The Gray Area Incubator is a membership program run by Gray Area for creators developing work in art and technology. The membership lasted for six months. Artists work in the disciplines of Visual Media Arts, Creative Code, Virtual & Augmented Reality, Civic Engagement & Digital Activism, Social Entrepreneurship, Data Science, Sound & Audio, and Software & Hardware.^[24]

Partnerships and projects

Gray Area Foundation for The Arts has partnered with the MIT Senseable City Lab to produce a multi-faceted series of community initiatives and symposiums called Senseable Cities Speaker Series.^[25]

City Centered Festival brought together artists, educators and community leaders within the Tenderloin district using 'locative media'.^[26]

Syzygryd is a collaboration with three other arts organizations (Interpretive Arson, False Profit Labs and Ardent Heavy Industries) to create a large scale interactive art piece to be unveiled at the 2010 Burning Man event.^[27]

Gray Area partnered with Gaian Systems to produce the Experiential Space Research Lab (2019-2020), with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The selected twelve artists (Bz Zhang, Celeste Martore, Jonathon Keats, Kelly Skye, Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Orestis Herodotou, Rena Tom, Romie Littrell, Stephanie Andrews, Stephen Standridge, Yulia Pinkusevich) co-created a 2020 exhibition titled The End of You.^{[28][29][30][31]}

The annual Recombinant Festival is held by Recombinant Media Labs (RML) at the Grand Theater since 2016 in partnership with Gray Area,^[32] as a multi day event dedicated to audiovisual performances and spatial experimentation.^[1] The partnership between Recombinant Media Labs and Gray Area dates back to 2009 when the then Tenderloin gallery space became the official home of RML.^[2]

Media coverage

Gray Area's Josette Melchor was selected as one of the five innovators showcased on Ford's The Edge of Progress Tour.^[33]

After the 2016 Oakland "Ghostship" warehouse fire, Gray Area raised approximately $1.3 million from over 12,000 donors which it distributed to 390 applicants, ranging from deceased victims' next of kin, displaced residents, people injured in the fire, as well as chosen family within marginalized communities.^[34]