Josette Melchor on First Career Steps and the Evolution of Gray Area
Q&A for Making Ways Podcast
Josette Melchor doesn’t like traditionally defined boundaries or labels, so it’s easy to guess how she came up with the name for Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the nonprofit gallery, education center, teaching hub, and technology and art collaboration center she started 15 years ago. Josette’s path to starting Gray Area — and her mission to expose as many people as possible to creative works that blur the lines between technology and fine art — is just as unpredictable as an exhibit you might see at the organization’s space. So when I sat down with Josette for Making Ways podcast, all about the unexpected paths to a creative career, we had an encompassing dialogue about her work as executive director of Gray Area, the first time her passion was ignited by the arts, and the artificial walls that San Francisco has erected between creative types and the technology set. Listen to the episode here. Below, you’ll find a Q&A excerpted from our lengthier conversation last month. If you’re interested in what it’s like to pursue a career following an inner GPS always tuned to you, read on.
Rob: Could you start by telling me a little bit about Gray Area?
Josette: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is a nonprofit art and technology center based in San Francisco’s Mission District. We have three main programs: education, where we teach teenagers and adults code and electronics so they can create interactive artwork; an artist incubator program, where we take artists through a six-month curriculum that allows them to develop a project that uses technology as the medium; and public events, which allow us to showcase the work that’s created in our incubator and in our education program as well as partner with outside organizations to produce content related to media arts. Our headquarters is. . .a 1940s single-screen cinema repurposed into a media art center, and it’s an amazing space to be in to develop and to create.
Rob: What was the first thing that turned you on to the art world?
Josette: I was a little bit of a creative, outgoing, weird young person. I grew up in the desert of the Coachella Valley, making my own fun. In the desert, you dig holes instead of climbing trees. It’s a whole different way of living. I would often complain that only aliens could live there. But what really got me into the arts was my first visit to a museum as a teenager. That’s when I started to realize how important artists and the arts were, especially in terms of presenting them as an experience, because I was often playing the role of experience designer — I was the commissioner of sprit in high school, running pep rallies and creating dance experiences and things like that. So when I got home from the museum, I looked up the Art Institute in the Yellow Pages and enrolled there.
Rob: How did you get into the technology side of things?
Josette: This is a silly answer to your question, but I remember when I was promoting events in Los Angeles for my first gallery and Myspace had come out, I was really excited about. . .learning how to make my page look so much better and just having that agency to be able to change the page and promote my events.
Rob: Thank you, MySpace.
Josette: It became a lot easier to promote events through that platform and through social networking because you weren’t running around having to flyer. And the social aspect was very exciting. I was already in classes on electronic music and web design using the Adobe Creative Suite, but this was a different moment. It was like, Oh wow. This is really useful and can help me share the experiences that I’m trying to create for the local community.
Rob: So what did you do after college?
Speaker2: When you’re a teenager and in your early 20s, you have some sort of superpower that allows you to just constantly work. I was working at a bank, running a gallery, doing web development, and going to school. I went to massage school. I was doing so many things all at once that I can’t really say that I did anything after college because I was always doing things throughout. I think in 2008 I was able to transition from doing five things at once to doing Gray Area full time.
I started Gray Area around 2002 in Los Angeles. It was actually originally a project called Hear gallery, based out of a warehouse that I had leased on Beverly and Alvarado, which produced community-based art shows and performances. The band Airborne Toxic Event played, and I was also DJing, mostly indie and electro hipster music. When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, I immediately leased another space in SoMa next to DNA Lounge and started it up again here.
Rob: What was it about starting this organization that really drove you? What kind of lasting impact do you hope to have with it?
Josette: My life has been changed so much by allowing myself to be creative and creating safe spaces to facilitate creative expression and allow diverse audiences to work together in a shared space. A lot of people don’t allow themselves space to think outside of structures. Gray Area provides the opportunity to remove the boundaries between fields. That’s where the name comes from. That’s kind of what I’m all about. I have a hard time with labels. I have a hard time explaining that I’m queer, that I’m Mexican. So the impact that I hope to have is just providing a venue and a viewpoint that is outside of people’s norms.
Rob: Can you talk about how people who have gone through Gray Area have seen their lives transformed and also how the community has been transformed by their work?
Josette: One of the biggest examples is our apprenticeship program. A lot of the teenagers have already gone through coding boot camps or some sort of “let’s make an app” weekend, but we help them learn how to use the medium to create their own artistic expressions. [This is an especially powerful experience for the young girls in the program.] They explain our mission better than we do. It’s really important that people use the medium to express themselves, and I think that these young girls are able to see what we’re trying to do. . . .Our success is also infused in the way that we run our programs in general. We have a model that allows people to start as a patron and attendee by buying a ticket. After being exposed to work, they can enroll in a class or become an apprentice and learn how to make the work that they were inspired by. Eventually, they can become an instructor and give back to the community. Many people have gone on to become creative coders and artists who use interactive technology.
Rob: What an incredible cycle. Was that something that evolved along with Gray Area or was it your vision from the start?
Josette: The Gray Area life cycle did not come to fruition until we got this theater three years ago. . . .The reason it took so long is because of space and place. We were in the Tenderloin for about seven years. Being in the Tenderloin, you’re faced with so many social issues every day, so a lot of our programs started to meld around civic innovation — trying to respond to what was happening outside of our windows. You know, drug use, homelessness, the disparity of incomes between Twitter across the street and people shooting up in front of our doors. We started to develop a lot of programs like the urban prototyping festival that allowed us to redesign the streets and create projects that respond to social issues on the street level. And then we moved back to the Mission and into a space that was made for art. Now we’ve been able to think hard about what we’re trying to do.
I appreciate the time we had in the Tenderloin because it gave us our civic and social mission and grounded us in the fact that artists and technologists have the power to give back to cities. Gray Area has always had to think about sustainable models that give back to the organization in terms of revenue but also in terms of community support, because without community support and without revenue, we just would not exist. We get a tiny bit of support from the government, but the amount is so small that we could make it in one weekend with a ticketed event rather than writing a grant that takes three months and then takes a year for us to find out if we get it and ends up being 75 bucks.
Rob: Obviously, we live in a place that has such a deep history in both the arts and tech. What do you think is most important about the cross-pollination of the arts and tech in San Francisco?
Josette: There is a sentiment in San Francisco that technology is creating issues in terms of affordable housing and in terms of culture. I don’t agree with this. There are a few reasons that displacement has happened many times in San Francisco that don’t necessarily have to do with one industry. The advertising industry is huge here. Banking is huge here. Everyone uses technology. I think that the arts community needs to open up a bit, and the same is true of the technology industry.
When I first moved here, I would go to art shows and try to get to know all of the galleries. When I was looking for jobs, I was introduced to someone working at a technology company, and it was just a whole entirely different scene of people. It wasn’t that the people were totally different. It’s just that they’re not going to the same events. Once people get in the same room, it changes the dynamic between communities. I’m not entirely sure how that happens, other than what we do at Gray Area on a day-to-day basis. . . .I don’t think you can pin these large social issues on any one industry. It’s just such a broad question that I always have a problem responding to it.
When we first moved to the Mission, we started talking to the local community, and everyone was wondering what the heck we’re doing, because the space had been a dollar store for 25 years. We quickly realized when we said technology, people would just shut down. There’s a sentiment that tech companies are taking over office spaces and changing the dynamic of neighborhoods in San Francisco. So we started changing the way that we explained ourselves. We changed our name from Art and Technology Center to Media Arts Center and that started changing the dynamic with the neighborhood. Eventually, the community started to understand that we’re in arts; we just had to say “art” a million times.
Rob: Are you working on any new projects that you’re really excited about?
Josette: There are a few. One is a fun thing. I have a Burning Man art car called the Pyramid Scheme. It’s a 16-foot-tall roving pyramid covered with LCD panels. So that is awesome. I also have an experiential media studio, Dreamboat, that I’ve been running with Ray McClure. It’s mostly Ray; I’m just doing some creative direction stuff. . . .I also want to throw a parade. I won’t tell you the specifics. . .but I want to throw a parade that highlights technology in a unique way. A goal of mine over the next several years is to produce content that is technologically advanced but where nobody talks about the technology. They just talk about the experience.
Thanks to Josette for joining Making Ways and for her openness in sharing so much of her journey. You can listen to her episode of the podcast here. For all the latest on Gray Area, visit www.grayarea.org, and for more stories of unexpected paths to creative careers, subscribe to Making Ways on iTunes, SoundCloud, Overcast, or your favorite podcast listening place. And for show notes, original illustrations, articles, and more, visit www.makingways.co.
