Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Inc. is a 501(c)3 non-profit art organization which hosts exhibitions, music events, software and electronics classes, a media lab, and a resident artist program.

History
Melchor and Hirshberg initially opened Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) in 2006, following a conversation about the lack of proper venues for the exhibition of new media and technology-based art works. By 2008, the gallery had incorporated as a non-profit and was renamed the Gray Area Foundation for The Arts. In June 2009, Gray Area relocated to its facility at 55 Taylor Street (later 923 Market Street, then 2665 Mission Street ), near the beginning of Taylor Street. This 8000 sqft location included a pornography arcade, a bar (Club 65), and a liquor store.

When the Art Theatres pornography arcade (that had been there since the 1970s) moved out, property owner Jack Sumski decided that "it was time to do something in my old age, to get something going, and give the Tenderloin a future" and invested heavily to prepare the site for Gray Area. The space allowed Gray Area to expand its exhibition platform to include artist residencies, educational workshops, and symposiums.

Gray Area Foundation for The Arts is part of a coalition of city agencies, arts organizations and community service providers attempting to revitalize a neighborhood that has historically struggled with the effects of substance abuse, addiction, and poverty.

Gray Area Festival
Launched in 2015, the Gray Area Festival is the first International media arts festival in San Francisco. The format of the festival is art shows, daily talks and night performances. With initial presentations by Jane Metcalfe, Michael Naimark, Golan Levin, Camille Utterback and night events by Shigeto, Alessandro Cortini, and others. The follow-up of the festivals was in 2016, 2017, and a 2018 edition. After the #ReviveTheGrand campaign, the first Gray Area Festival took place in 2015. 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.

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.

The Gray Area Festival 2019 focused on experiences including augmented reality, virtual reality and XR. 2019 centered around the Experiential Space Research Lab, ISM Hexadrome and a robotic exoskeleton performance, Inferno. Also, Gray Area Founder Josette Melchor transitioned her role from Executive Director to Board Member, making the Gray Area Executive Director Barry Threw, who also served as the curator of Gray Area Festival 2019.

The 6th 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. The festival featured Anti-Gone by Theo Triantafyllidis, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Phazero, LaTurbo Avedon, Lawrence Lek, Morehshin Allahyari and Stephanie Dinkins.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

Media coverage
Gray Area's Josette Melchor was selected as one of the five innovators showcased on Ford's The Edge of Progress Tour.

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.