Jessica Gutierrez

Artist | Educator | Activist

Written by Nathan Zanon | Photography by Daniel Garcia

Artist, educator, and activist Jessica Gutierrez might be new to the San Jose arts scene, but she’s already having an impact. A teacher at James Lick High School, Gutierrez first became involved with the arts community through her work at Be the Change Yoga, integrating art into their public programs and coordinating with local organizations for the Conscious San Jose Festival. Living in a building with apartments upstairs and empty space on the ground floor, she and her collaborator, Jesse Santos, had the idea to host a gallery show featuring art made by Gutierrez and her housemates. The result was the first Martha Street Art Night—a small gathering that has since grown into a series of sporadically scheduled community events drawing hundreds of people to showcase, participate in, and share art. She has added food and music, and the event is generating enough buzz that she is already trying to figure out how to scale up.

“Martha Street Art Night was my first experiment of what it looks like to have an intention and hold space for other people. It started as a fun thing where I can host people in my home and share art—but I don’t have the capacity to do it frequently, and in terms of the space, it’s at that capacity point where we might have to find another space. I’ve been thinking about what that would look like, but at the same time, maybe the appeal is that it’s in a home, a space of comfort and welcoming. If I partnered with a gallery, would the same community want to come, knowing that there are all these formalisms that come with that? Is it okay if it draws different crowds? It’s not about what I want; it’s about what’s needed by the people who are coming. I also want to model for my students that these are the kinds of spaces you can create, especially understanding gentrification and how that’s impacting San Jose and the East Side—how you can control what those spaces look like for the community as opposed to developers coming in and deciding for you what those spaces are.”

Follow Jessica Gutierrez at artnflow.com and on social media @marthastreetartnight, @conscioussanjose, and @jessicag.13