Outer Space Arcata is an arts and music center for the community.
Outer Space Arcata is an arts and music collective based out of Arcata, CA – Wiyot land. The focuses of Outer Space (a 100% volunteer run DreamMaker Project of the Ink People Center for the Arts since 2015) are community building, empowering youth, & promoting the understanding of societies’ oppressions through education and creative expression.
We aim to serve as an incubator for artists, writers, thinkers, and the youth of our community. We seek to empower ourselves alongside our communities by providing an all-ages, safer, and sober space to explore affirmative solutions to problems rooted in systems of oppression.
We host diverse and wide-ranging programming, including educational workshops, classes, live performances, an in-house library, cooperatively run artisan gift shop, and gallery space.
We strive for intersectionality in our approach to community engagement and programming, attempting to create a respectful, accessible space.
How did we get here?
Historically, DIY spaces have served as a meeting place for folks to come together, discuss new ideas, make friends, practice resilience, engage in resistance, and find out about all the cool things going on in their communities.
Here in Arcata, CA we have both the local youth population as well as the students at the Humboldt State University. As former students, locals that stuck around, and artists/community members that fell in love with the area, we had come to see the unfulfilled need for a local arts center that is truly all ages. This began the nearly four year long process of establishing our organization in the community, partnering with an umbrella non-profit to become a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, fundraising for a future all ages space, and eventually finding the ideal location near downtown Arcata, getting the keys on January 15, 2017 after a month-long crowdfunding campaign in November of 2016 to help raise enough for a deposit and a first month’s rent.
In December of 2019, the building we were in sold, and we are now back to square one of needing to find a new location where we can do all the things we were able to do in our old one. For now we are holding live music events at the Arcata Playhouse, Siren’s Song Tavern and Synapsis among other places. And in the meantime, we are lucky enough to find a temporary home for our zine library and gift shop in the Ten Pin Building where we are able to hold our weekly meetings and an assortment of community groups are able to also utilize the space for their own meetings.
What do we do here?
We provide nurturing outlets for the community through low-cost, all-ages, safer space programming. This includes donation-based classes and workshops focused on skill sharing and radical thinking, weekly music events featuring local and touring artists, and organizational meetings with open attendance to encourage participation and inclusion at all stages of our project. At music events, we place a strong emphasis on highlighting the voices of marginalized peoples that would otherwise struggle to have an outlet for performing. Our artist cooperative was formed to give new and emerging artists affordable access to the commercial art world offering a visible retail space to showcase their work. While contributing dues of $10/month to support the continuance of Outer Space, artists receive 100% of their sales or choose a 70/30 split of what they make with 70% to the artist & 30% to Outer Space.