A lone outpost of art and culture lives at Northridge Mall.

Enter the massive fortress of Northridge Shopping Center. Walk past the vast and gleaming Forever 21. Resist the raucous playgrounds, including one inside a store called Kidz Blast. Dodge the kids riding slow-moving animal scooters along a kiosk-lined thruway (but check out the kiosk selling belt buckles of the LGBT rainbow and Mexican flags next to iron crosses and the Confederate flag).

If you find the eyebrow-threading store cleverly called Eye Brow Art 23 (as in high-brow art), you’re getting closer. Amid the organized chaos and bustle and commerce, an honest-to-goodness art gallery occupies a store space in a quiet corner of Northridge Mall.

It’s a co-op called Main Street Art Gallery & Studio. It’s stuffed with art, every spot occupied, with portraits of young women looking forlorn, airbrush tributes, a cartoon of Ms. Pac-Man, a landscape of the Golden Gate Bridge, lowrider graphics, T-shirts with sassy slogans, hats airbrushed in urban style, a drawing of Bruce Lee, custom jewelry. It’s all on consignment, split 60-40 between artist and gallery, respectively.

Right in the middle of it all, four long drawing tables are set up with stools, easels, brushes and canvases, where co-op members conduct art classes.

Three artist friends in their 40s founded the gallery/studio. Corali Ramirez was born and raised – and still lives – in Gonzales. A portrait artist, she saw painting night classes booming on the East Coast and the Bay Area, but they were run by chains like Tipsy Canvas and Paint Nyte.

“I wanted to bring it out this way, but with collaborative artists,” she says.

She started it off on her own, in South County. Then she brought in Joseph Frausto, whom she had already been working with for eight years.

“He saw me getting busy in South County,” she says. They started looking at other locations. When Frausto came to her with an offer to occupy a spot in Northridge Mall, she didn’t believe him.

“I told the [mall owners] about my history here,” Frausto says. Back in the ’80s, his mother was a beautician at Northridge and he spent a lot of summers in the mall. It was his playground. His wife, Connie, worked six years as head of security at Mervyn’s. The space offered to them was the former arcade where Frausto used to play video games.

That’s where they offer four classes a week. Frausto leads skateboard art classes, and Ramirez teaches painting. Madonna, the daughter of departed Salinas radio and party DJ Bubba G. Scotch, teaches DJing on Wednesday evenings, while Anthony Faulkner, who Frausto says was in the movie Set It Off with Queen Latifah, teaches hip-hop dance on Mondays. “He’s a phenomenal dancer,” Frausto says.

The third founding partner is Adolfo Arias. He also has history with Northridge Mall. That’s where he saw his first airbrush poster at a store called International Imports. After he saw that, he switched from pencil, pen and charcoal portraits to airbrushing Aztec skulls, demons, wizards and cholos.

Now he does commissions on anything from canvas and jackets to helmets and airplanes. His airbrush classes are the most popular at Main Street, which he credits to his “more realistic style.”

“I don’t do too cartoony,” he says.

Frausto says they offer financial assistance for their classes, bring in kids from Alvarez High School’s Special Education Department to earn community credit for graduation, and they give away art pieces and supplies. If a kid just wants to come in and make art, they are welcome, for free – probably with a dose of mentoring from one of the eight artists of the co-op.

Ramirez donates 100 percent of her art supplies. “I don’t ask for a penny back,” she says.

Frausto says his parents separated when he was young and he knows what it’s like to be poor and not have access to culture or activities.

His own art covers abstracts, skateboard art and lowrider patterns of old-school licks, pinstripes, flames and graphics, a medley of street, youth and car culture blown up by the likes of Ed Hardy, Von Dutch and, locally, Rod Powell.

“It brought a lot of people together in the ’70s,” Frausto says. “It didn’t matter what nationality. A classic car with an incredible paint job will bring people together. A car show will break barriers.”

And, they believe, mend souls.

“Working at a hospice [facility], I saw a lot of lonely people pass away by themselves,” Frausto says. “I’ve witnessed a lot of heartbreak. I want to give people the opportunity to get back on the right track. I want to say that there’s a heaven. My heart leads me to believe that.”

Maybe a piece of it can be found, implausibly, at the mall.

MAIN STREET ART STUDIO & GALLERY, 796 Northridge Mall, Salinas. 10am-9pm Mon-Sat, 11am-7pm Sun; 970-9242, www.MainStreetArtStudio.com