Giving Compass' Take:

• Gray Area is a nonprofit digital art gallery that encourages artists to blend technology and the arts in order to critique the rising influence of tech in American society.  

• How can art provide meaningful commentary on social problems? How should arts donors engage with this commentary?

• Here are seven ways that technology is changing how art is made.  

Growing up in the desert, the daughter of a single working mother, Josette Melchor didn’t visit a museum until she was 17 years old. But from the very moment she set foot inside San Diego’s Contemporary Art Museum, she knew she wanted to devote her life to art. “I kind of had my mind blown,” she recalls. “I had the thought that artists could see the future.”

Melchor was still a teen when, as a 19-year-old art school student, she used her own savings to lease a warehouse with a group of friends in Los Angeles to produce music shows and exhibit the work of local artists. Three years later, she headed to San Francisco, first opening a location in the SoMa district, then renovating a former porn theater to create a digital art gallery in the Tenderloin and launching her nonprofit Gray Area.

“The reason it’s called Gray Area is that there’s really not a better way for us to describe artists using technology as a medium,” Melchor says. “There is a really big dichotomy between the two industries, and so Gray Area plays this role of cultural development and cross-sector collaboration and innovation.”

She says that she aims to use challenging art “to start conversations between artists and technologists criticizing the tech industry,” citing another part of the Gold San Francisco Exhibit, where F.A.T. Lab artists put up digital images of Facebook’s CEO outside the theater, emblazoned with the phrase “Rest in peace, Mark Zuckerberg.”

“People walking by thought we were throwing a Facebook event,” she says.

Melchor relishes being at the vanguard of community art and technology. As she notes, “There are not a lot of organizations that are set up to do that.”

Read the full article about the gray area of art and technology by Jay Woodruff at Fast Company.