Gilroy, California, often known as the “Garlic Capital of the World,” holds a rich cultural tapestry that extends far beyond its famous crop. Nestled in the heart of Santa Clara Valley, Gilroy is a town where agricultural roots blend with creativity.
The city’s growing community of artists, musicians, and creators is carving out space for art within its evolving culture. From public murals that reflect the town’s history to local art collectives chanting diverse voices, Gilroy’s art scene is blossoming and ready to share its unique voice.
One of Gilroy’s prominent artists and art advocates is Joey Castaneda, a fourth-generation native who discovered his passion for art at a young age. His love for tattoos, along with inspiration from his uncle José, drove Joey to bring his artwork to life by getting his first tattoo when he was just 14. By the time he was 15, Joey was deeply immersed in the world of tattooing. He quickly dove into the craft by exploring various styles and developing his skills.
Adopting the name Chokotattoos, Joey took his tattooing journey to the next level. Although he started with drawing as his first art medium, his true calling as a tattoo artist emerged during an apprenticeship with a friend. This pivotal experience allowed Joey to refine his craft, transitioning from casual experimentation to professional expertise. He quickly mastered various styles, including traditional, fine-line, and black-and-gray work, each of which requires a unique blend of precision and creativity.
Reflecting on his growth, Joey recognizes the importance of timing and mentorship in his development. His ability to adapt and learn from others has become a cornerstone of his success, fueling both his personal growth and his contributions to the artistic community. He shares, “Being in the right place at the right time and learning from the older generation, I feel like all the styles I learned early on were crucial to my career today.”
When Joey creates art, he explores a genre called Chicano surrealism, which draws inspiration from dreams and the unseen aspects of life. For Joey, the journey of art is never-ending. New mediums continually appear on the horizon, and he is eager to explore airbrushing and ceramics as his next craft. “I try everything if I can, especially if there is someone there who knows it well. If they want to teach me, I’ll sit and try it out and give it my best,” he says.
After serving in the army, Joey’s passion for tattooing remained strong. Yet his desire to amplify the voice of artists in his community grew even stronger. Together with his wife, Jade, he founded the Shades of Brown Alliance (SOBA), an alliance dedicated to providing resources, opportunities, and work for local artists. Serving as SOBA’s collective founder and executive director, Joey’s mission is rooted in the culture of the Gilroy community. Beyond SOBA’s mission, Joey is committed to nurturing the next generation of artists by helping them become self-sufficient and ensuring they receive the recognition they deserve. His goal is to empower artists to fully utilize the resources available to them and to embrace growth and appreciation for their talents.
A major challenge SOBA deals with is exploitation. That’s because the community in Gilroy often lacks knowledge on how to approach art commissions to ensure that work is fairly valued and compensated. Compared to San Jose, Joey believes that Gilroy lags 10 years behind in terms of its artist community.
To create opportunities for SOBA’s artists, the organization helps iron out pay discrepancies, streamline invoicing, and equips artists with necessary tools. Joey explains that “most of the time artists sell themselves short. Even though they know their work is worth $300, they will say they can do it for $50. If you keep this pattern going, you are not going to the next level.”
The organization also hosts bi-monthly meetings, which alternate between board meetings and artist networking sessions. Workshops that would provide opportunities for artists to learn figurative drawing, spray painting, and more are in the works for the coming year.
SOBA brings the community together through events that showcase a vibrant mix of culture and creativity, from vinyl DJs and lowrider enthusiasts to a diverse group of vendors and artists. These collective efforts are central to SOBA’s fundraising initiatives, which support both the artists and the community. SOBA embraces a wide range of artistic expressions, from traditional art forms to more unconventional ones, like baking and tattooing. Currently, Joey’s vision for SOBA is to secure larger and more impactful projects for the artists to expand their reach and influence while embracing a stronger, more connected community of artists. For example, SOBA is in the process of securing fiscal sponsorship through Local Color, which will provide the group with opportunities to grow.
In collaboration with Emily McEwan-Upright, founder of 6th Street Studios & Art Center and 1202 Contemporary gallery, Joey’s next major project for SOBA is a large mural that will serve as a centerpiece for the Youth Mentorship Program and will emphasize nurturing the next generation of artists. Known for its vibrant support of the arts community, 6th Street Studios & Art Center offers a range of resources, from rental spaces and art classes to creative programs. The center also leads youth mentorship initiatives and cultivates creativity across all ages and skill levels. Through their shared vision, Joey and Emily aim to foster a strong, inclusive artistic community that uplifts local and marginalized voices.
Joey’s deep-rooted connection to Gilroy drives his passion for supporting local artists. For him, providing these resources is a personal mission to uplift the community. While Joey envisions expanding SOBA beyond Gilroy, he remains committed to making his hometown the heart of the collective. Joey envisions the town as not only the birthplace of SOBA but also as a cultural hub whose unique character and artistic contributions are celebrated. Gilroy’s identity will anchor SOBA’s growth, allowing it to influence and inspire both local and regional art communities.
Her mouth is wide—stretched beyond the common yawn, laugh, or scream. She sits upright, strained—her feet pushed hard against the Earth, legs opened enough for her child to fall into the hands of his awaiting father. The photograph is dense with detail—wooden barn, lamb and donkey atop hay. This is Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus as depicted by UK-based photographer Natalie Lennard. A part of Lennard’s Birth Undisturbed series, Creation of Man is one of many pieces by Lennard entrusted to gallerist Emily McEwan-Upright. A San Jose native, in 2019, McEwan-Upright took over a 1,200-square-foot storefront in downtown Gilroy to act as the home base for her feminist-minded art gallery. McEwan-Upright’s Gallery 1202 opened its doors that October, and by the end of November 2019, it was hosting its first group exhibition, Show Me Your Neon: A Feminist Dialogue. The collection was a clear statement of intent on McEwan-Upright’s part, who explains, “It was all about discussing the challenges that women face either as an artist or as a woman, or as a sister, or mother, challenges as a black woman, as a Chinese woman, as anything. I really wanted works that spoke about different things. I don’t want everything to be the same. I wanted it all to be different.” That first exhibit sits as a highlight and hallmark of the gallery headspace.
McEwan-Upright has a bachelor’s degree in art history from the University of California Santa Barbara as well a master’s degree in art history from the San Jose State University, an education that fostered her love of research, which facilitates her quest for a variety of female voices. Looking briefly at an exhibition roster at Gallery 1202 will show you artists from Slovakia and India, as well as McEwan-Upright’s neighbors in Gilroy. It is as vital to lift up local artists as it is to bring international artists to the community. “I definitely have a mission for the gallery. I want to elevate the artists in Gilroy, but also elevate these marginalized voices that haven’t been able to be represented because of either sex, race, or materials. That’s my big thing—do that while exposing people in Gilroy to more artists.”
I definitely have a mission for the gallery. I want to elevate the artists in Gilroy, but also elevate these marginalized voices that haven’t been able to be represented because of either sex, race, or materials. That’s my big thing—do that while exposing people in Gilroy to more artists.
Throughout college, McEwan-Upright parlayed her bookkeeping experience into an enrolled agent certification and managed to launch Gallery 1202 while maintaining her career as a tax preparer. Her husband, US Navy Lieutenant Commander Rory Patrick Upright, gets called away often, but McEwan-Upright has help from her nearby parents and a cousin who assists with both the gallery as well as with McEwan-Upright’s tax practice. Her family and those of her artists and guests are fundamental to the success of the gallery’s goal. Children are welcomed with a bag of toys tucked behind a couch. This is life in full overlap—both personal and work life blending into the modern lifestyle of the working artist. With the shared experience of the working mother, McEwan-Upright builds an immediate connection between herself and the artists she chooses to work with. “A lot of them are women who have very young children, like I do. A lot of them that I met, I met with my children. They’ve met my kids, I’ve met their kids, and that’s not something that you get in a gallery environment. I want to support women who have the studio in the nook of their house.” This sentiment was echoed by artist Natalie Ciccoricco, “Emily visited my home studio, and we really hit it off. We’re both passionate about art, and we’re both juggling our art careers with motherhood, so we really bonded over that. It’s really remarkable how much she has achieved with her gallery in such a short time. I applaud her for her dedication to representing marginalized artists from the moment she opened her gallery. She works really hard to get her artists’ work seen.”
Beyond the exhibits at her Gilroy location, the gallery’s reach broadened through events like the LA Art Show, which saw over 75,000 in attendance over one weekend, and Superfine in San Francisco. McEwan-Upright had a full calendar leading up to the shelter-in-place order that has kept the gallery’s doors closed. She had to make some adjustments to her workflow to ensure the work she represents is visible and available to her audience. She has deepened the gallery’s online presence, finding success selling pieces through sites like Artsy, Artnet, and 1stdibs. If having the physical space connects her to the tightly knit nature of the community that binds Gilroy together, being forced to focus on the online sales helped Gallery 1202 gain exposure to a global audience. Online, there is no difference between a gallery in New York City, Los Angeles, or Gilroy. It is the art that moves, and now McEwan-Upright is regularly selling work across the country and across the world.
McEwan-Upright lights up when discussing all of the artists she has plans for at the gallery. There’s artist Yulia Shtern and her upcycled sculptures of animals affected by humankind, Ritu Sinha’s mixed-media works depicting the political strife she’s experienced in her native India, and Natalie Ciccoricco’s A Thread of Color, a solo exhibition putting Ciccoricco’s blending of found imagery and embroidery on full display. Each artist offers a different lived experience—that variety of female representation that McEwan-Upright craves. With each piece, her cadre of artists display a variety of materials and techniques used—the watercolors of Sinha’s pieces against the threaded collage work of Ciccorico, the traditional fine art and the craft and folk art that certain materials immediately self-categorize. This was the intention from the start of the gallery. A look at the first exhibition, Show Us Your Neon: A Feminist Dialogue, was a visualized forming of a question; as McEwan-Upright states, “I had different kinds of mediums. I had a woman who works with all fiber. We’re crossing that boundary between crafts versus fine arts, and why is there even a division between craft and fine art? I want to hone in on women, black women who work in contemporary art. I want to hone in on people who do textile works and why is that a craft, things like that. It was a perfect show for me to start out with, because it encapsulates all of these marginalized voices. I just really loved it.”
McEwan-Upright had the gallery booked well into 2021 with exhibits, and trips were set to both display at art fairs and speak on panels across the country. Those exhibits involved artists living across the globe and with no clear date when the world will be safe once again for large crowds, a lot will have to change on the fly, which is something that McEwan-Upright is accustomed to. She has worked with ever-changing scenarios—husband in the military, two children under the age of four, a new business venture fitting alongside her established work as a tax preparer. Despite being pulled in all directions, she is continually focused on her mission to offer an avenue for those voices that rarely get heard, for the women that don’t want to give up the dream of creating art just because they became mothers. “Women who are doing art at two o’clock in the morning because that’s when their baby is sleeping, that’s hard for them. It’s hard for them to find representation. People think that they’re distracted by their children, whereas I think it can inspire them too. It’s all about this balance in life.”
