Program areas at Gray Area Foundation For The Arts
PUBLIC EVENTS:We hosted ninety-five (95) total events in 2022. Fifteen (15) of these events were in partnership with local community nonprofit organizations which we supported through sharing resources and staff. Two of our events were self-produced, multi-day festivals: Gray Area Festival, a conference, exhibition, and performance festival surveying culture through the lens of interdisciplinary practice over seven (3) days of programming reaching eight thousand five hundred (8,500) people; and Recombinant Cinechamber, an audio/visual expanded cinema performance with three (3) weeks of programming reaching over two-thousand (2000) people. The Soundwave performance series was dedicated to showcasing emerging local audiovisual artists. We did not produce a dedicated fundraising event in 2022.
EDUCATION:Gray Area's Creative Code Education program services include: Intensives, Workshops, and Scholarship opportunities. Gray Area develops STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) curriculum for artistic development by teaching interdisciplinary skills through the creation of artwork. In 2022, we continued to offer our Creative Code Intensive and launched two new programs including the Open Metaverse Intensive, designed to empower artists to develop in extended reality technologies, and the Responsible Technology Design Intensive, exploring the role of social justice in art.We prioritize enrollment for a diversity of backgrounds within our Education and Cultural Incubator programs. Our biannual creative code Immersive enrolled 65% of students who identify as women, 12% who identify as non-binary and 80% of students who are BIPOC. We support this inclusive enrollment through diversity targeted scholarships and teaching assistantships. In 2022, we granted over 93 (ninety-three) students $61,680 value in scholarships, expanding access to knowledge and growth in creative skill sets.Education: ImmersiveOur twelve (12) week intensive education course taught nineteen (19) Creative Code students over two (2) sessions, and hosted two (2) showcases which shared their work with five-hundred (500) members of the general public.Education: WorkshopsIn 2022, we continued to offer hybrid education courses and served three hundred fifty two (352) students in sixteen (16) interdisciplinary education workshops that ran throughout the year. Ten (10) of these workshops and courses were held online, while workshops and our twelve-week creative code education course was held in-person.
Incubation:Gray Area's Incubator services include Residency, Research Lab, and Sponsorship opportunities. Gray Area collaborates with artists and creative practitioners who critically investigate new ideas, create and adapt technologies through their work, and engage with pressing social and civic issues.Incubation: ResidencyWe had nineteen (19) individual residents throughout the year in our Incubator Residency, which lasts for two sessions of seventy-two (72) weeks each and produced two (2) showcases that each reached three-hundred (300) members of the general public. We had four (4) shared studio members in our private studio spaces. The residencies, showcases, and events for the Residency adapted to hybrid programs in-person and online to offer access to a wider audience.Incubation: Fiscal SponsorshipsWe continued to manage six (6) fiscally sponsored projects: Art Hack Day, a hackathon project for media artists; Living Room Light Exchange, a discussion and presentation series for emerging artists; and the Zachary Watson Memorial Fund, a scholarship program, AMPL Labs, a project raising awareness of the cultural effect of colonialism and impact of deep-fake forgeries; Recombinant Media Labs, a creative producer of immersive audio/visual experiences; and School for Poetic Computation, an education program exploring the intersections of code, design, hardware and theory.In 2022, Gray Area also became fiscal sponsors for Codame, a network of artists and technologists, and CoPlace, a community building project focused on economic growth.