A Community Arts Center for San Diego
Space 4 Art is a crossroads where artists and innovators from different disciplines intersect and interact, bringing new vitality to our city.
Founded in 2009, Space 4 Art functions as a creative incubator and critical nexus of artists living, working, and interacting with each other. It grew out of four years of meetings, presentations, surveys, and design sessions with artists, architects, and community members, all of which established the need for such a space. Hundreds of volunteers working thousands of hours constructed the facility, which provides affordable spaces for artists, free educational outreach for under-resourced students, and diverse cultural offerings for the community at large. The result of involving so many people in the Space’s design, construction, and management is creative and communal empowerment— and a sense of ownership by all who pass through our doors.
Affordable Studios
Space 4 Art tends to attract multidisciplinary, experimental artists at various stages of career. We encourage artist participation in our community through co-produced events, co-designed educational programs, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Arts Education
Many of our artists create work that integrates various STEM fields and the arts. This unique practice makes them ideal STEAM (STEM + Arts) facilitators. Our programming is project-based and created in collaboration with community partners.
Events
Experimental doesn’t mean aloof or intimidating! We like to describe the work created here as fun, quirky, thought-provoking, empathetic, and healing. It also tends to be highly engaging, inviting audience reflection and participation.
Help us build the future
Where We’re Going
In order to have a lasting community impact, Space 4 Art must purchase and build out a permanent Arts Center. Without permanency, Space 4 Art continuously faces disruption and displacement by gentrification, and will disappear like so many art centers before it. The development of a large-scale, multidisciplinary Arts Center with live/work and work-only studios, gallery and performance spaces, and classrooms is of utmost importance— for all San Diego.
“Without Space 4 Art, my immersive experience, Relics of the Hypnotist War, never would have been born or fully realized.Not only has Space 4 Art provided affordable studio space, but it has given me something far more important: a supportive artistic community.
My time here has been transformative and essential to my artistic growth.”
– S4A Resident Artist, Ryan Griffith.
Ryan Griffith in his studio at Space 4 Art. PC Stacy Keck