In the early 1980s, friends John Martin and Marshall Weber opened the Martin/Weber Gallery at 220 Eighth Street in SF’s SoMa District. In October of 1983, Martin, Weber, and several other media artists and individuals started organizing to convert the commercial venture to a non-profit organization. Although Artists’ Television Access (ATA) later expanded its scope and mission, ATA began as a television production facility where the public could create their own content for broadcast on Artists’ Television, ATA‘s local cable television program. ATA launched programming in 1984 and received tax-exempt status in 1985. On Halloween night in 1986, a fire left ATA’s SoMa space uninhabitable, so ATA briefly relocated to an artists’ warehouse on Clarion Alley in SF’s Mission District. ATA then moved to its current space at 992 Valencia Street in early 1987, and they had their first show in the new space on April 28, 1987.
To learn more about ATA’s History, watch the ATA Lives video on Vimeo and visit the History of ATA website.