The only catch? Their storefront on the corner of Mission Street and Geneva Avenue needed a ton of work. The first thing Falchi Macias and Davaz McGowan noticed was the smell.

"It was rotting flesh with a little side of fish," recalls Davaz McGowan, wrinkling her nose. "Imagine that mixed with 10 years of mildew and funk."

With the help of 50 volunteers, the Youth Art Exchange team emptied ancient dish buckets, threw away rusty lobster cages, cleared out old deli fridges and chiseled tiles off the walls. The nonprofit ArtSpan, which came on as a co-tenant and keeps an artist studio in the space, activated its network of artists to help. Three months later, in June 2018, Youth Art Exchange's first classes at the new [x]space were in session.

With a faculty of practicing artists, including musicians, designers and photographers, [x]space offers a wide range of curricula to diverse cohorts of high school students, and all after-school classes and summer programs are free. (They also regularly offer free events and workshops to the public, like the upcoming fundraiser and art market on Oct. 10.) This past summer's intensive programs focused on printmaking, film and music production. Sessions kicking off this school year include the above-mentioned disciplines, plus architecture, photography, industrial and product design, fashion design and dance.

"We want to make the arts really accessible across economic boundaries," says Falchi Macias, explaining that Youth Art Exchange programming is designed to mirror intro-level college art studio classes.

"Some youth come in and they have very limited skills, and we’re bringing them to a high-beginning, lower-intermediate level as fast as we can," says music production instructor Alfie Macias, who is also a percussionist, DJ and the musical director of award-winning Brazilian dance ensemble Sambaxé. "And others are coming in with vocal training, instrument training, theory, so with them we’re going straight into composition and showing them what’s possible in a recording environment."

He adds that one of his main goals is to expose students to audio careers in the Bay Area, where the industry is geared towards audio-for-video and live sound engineering. Indeed, some Youth Art Exchange students are well on their way to professional music careers. At Youth Art Exchange's Youth Digital Music Festival this past May (where, full disclosure, I was a guest speaker), a 16-year-old rapper named Fusion casually announced that he was stopping in to "do this little show" for his teachers before heading off for tour in Central America.

The students who use [x]space come from the Excelsior, Mission and Bayview neighborhoods, among others, and represent a wide variety of public schools. [x]space, located on a busy block with Chinese restaurants, liquor stores and a pupusería, sits in the heart of a diverse neighborhood that's predominantly Asian and Latinx. As San Francisco becomes increasingly more affluent, white and childless, [x]space serves as a crucial gathering space for teens of color whose families bear the brunt of current economic pressures.