New Vallejo Museum board president brought theater to Vallejo’s youth. Now she wants to bring youth to the museum

VALLEJO – The Vallejo Naval & Historical Museum’s new board president Maria Stats is brimming with ideas on how to help the museum thrive. She’s emphasizing strong ties with community organizations and activating Vallejo’s youth, both as visitors and volunteers.

Stats is also co-founder of On the Fringe Visual and Performing Arts, where for the last nine years she has sought to provide education in theater to Vallejo students and put on plays for adults that highlight marginalized or underrepresented people. On the Fringe has long used the museum as a venue, and now Stats has stepped down from the theater board to focus on her new role.

She joins the museum as it faces several challenges, including leadership turnover and building maintenance issues. But she’s used to conquering hurdles. 

Stats grew up with an abusive biological father who struggled with alcoholism and a largely absent mother who had to work three jobs to keep a roof over their heads. 

Starting at 5 years old, she found a safe space in the theater, first at St. Dominic, a Catholic school in Benicia, and later at Vallejo’s Hogan High School.

“It’s really hard to grow up in a broken home,” Stats said, “but when you do theater, you have an instant family because you all love the same thing and you’re working on one common goal.”

As a youth, she focused on musical theater. She had big dreams. She was on track to graduate from Hogan with a 4.3 GPA and applied to the best performing arts schools in New York. Then tragedy struck. 

One week after she testified in a court case for Napa Emergency Women’s Services, a battered women’s shelter where she volunteered, Stats was assaulted, an incident she believes was related to her testimony. A man wearing a ski mask broke into her house while she was in the shower, pinned her down, cracked her skull, cut her with a knife and strangled her, busting her vocal cords. The intruder was never arrested.

Stats said the only reason she was not killed is that her mentor, Helen Grieco, at the time executive director of California’s National Organization for Women, insisted that every woman she worked with take self-defense classes. Stats is only 4 feet 11 inches, but she fought the intruder so hard that she ripped the toilet off the floor.

“I could hear Helen in my ear saying, ‘You are not stronger. You are stuck. Be smarter,’” Stats said. 

She started yelling for her boyfriend to come and bring the gun, even though no boyfriend or gun was in the house. The assailant got spooked and fled, but the damage was done. Stats couldn’t speak or walk for months. 

After much physical and vocal therapy, she recovered her mobility and her voice, but not her ability to sing. Her career in musical theater was over before it even started. 

“I was very upset. My father had tried to keep me small, but I thought I had the talent to go to New York and do big things,” Stats said. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t love Vallejo. Almost everything I am you can link back to this town, but my dream had been broken and I was back to square one.”

Downcast, she gave up on a career in the arts and decided to study political science. One day she saw an ad for a free play on campus and she went to check it out. It was a workshop for the Laramie Project, a play about the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. 

Stats knew right away that she had to get back into theater. She wanted to tell underrepresented stories like Shepard’s. 

“I realized that the world doesn’t get any bigger by where you’re standing,” she said. “It gets bigger by where you’re looking at and what you’re opening yourself up to.”

Stats graduated from community college, studying early childhood education, theater, and anthropology. Then she got a teaching certification from California College of the Arts and started working as an arts teacher at Vallejo Charter School.

She married her high school sweetheart and had four children, whom she homeschooled. When she couldn’t afford to enroll them in theater classes, which had been free in Vallejo when Stats was a child, she decided to fill the gap. She and her brother Bryan Payne co-founded On the Fringe Visual and Performing Arts. 

On the Fringe seeks to bring culturally diverse, female driven theater and arts to Solano County. The company, now almost nine years old, produces adult and children’s plays. It is 100% volunteer run and free for children to take classes. 

“We fundraise all year to take the kids to the Junior Theater Festival, which is the biggest theater festival in the world, at absolutely no cost,” Stats said proudly. “They compete with eight other countries and over 2,500 kids, and we always do very well. We just got back and they won for music with Sondheim’s Into The Woods.”

Stats always had deep affection for the Vallejo Museum, which she visited as a child. On the Fringe brought her back to this historic institution.

Hoping for a beautiful venue to stage her company’s plays, she approached Jim Kern, former executive director of the museum, and told him she’d like to do her first show in the Heritage Chamber on the second floor. The rent was steep, but Kern let her put down a deposit, and pay the rest at the end of the run with the box office takings. 

“We both had our fingers crossed it would do well. And it did,” Stats said.

Ever since then, On the Fringe has staged their plays at the museum. For the adult plays, the company pays full rental price. For the kids shows, as long as the program continues to be free, they get a big discount. (The museum has similar arrangements with many nonprofits.)

Stats started volunteering at the museum from time to time. In 2020, Kern asked her and On the Fringe to co-found the Kids Book Fest, which donates free books to children. Stats spent even more time at the museum. 

In 2022, executive director Melinda McCrary, who had succeeded Kern, encouraged her to become part of the board. Stats was concerned that it would be seen as a conflict of interest, since her company used the space, but McCrary told her she had nothing to worry about: as a board member, she was a volunteer with no pay, and the conditions for using the Heritage Chamber would remain the same. 

“The first year I was here,” Stats said, “I came in at least one full day a week to volunteer, whether it was to clean, answer phones, make copies or to help set up for events.”

She was officially voted in as a board member in 2023. Trying to figure out how she could best contribute, she decided to focus on the biggest annual fundraiser: the auction and gala. She went around Vallejo asking for free contributions for food and auction items, so that every cent fundraised could go straight to the museum. 

“To let me be the point person when the board didn’t know me well was a gamble. They had to trust me when I said I could do it,” she explains. “We sold out, and we did very well.”

In January 2024, Stats was voted president of the board. She stepped down from the board of directors of On the Fringe, so she could be fully dedicated to the museum. 

One of her biggest goals this year is to reinforce community partnerships. 

“We would love to partner with the school district and GVRD [the Greater Vallejo Recreation District] to enrich student programming,” she said. “I would also love to partner with local senior centers to make sure residents know about the museum and can participate in visits.”

Marketing and fundraising are two crucial pillars to keep this institution healthy. The museum already offers some of the biggest events in Vallejo, according to Stats, but not everybody knows. Figuring out how to reach a new audience is key. 

“Our programs are diverse and eclectic,” she said. “One day you have World AIDS Day, which last year brought in over 100 people. The next you may have a car exhibit. We host a genealogy group on Tuesdays. To me, this is so Vallejo, because we have people here from many different backgrounds.” 

With a skeleton crew of one full time and two part time employees, volunteers do a lot of heavy lifting at the museum, and Stats wants to make sure their efforts are celebrated this year. 

As per fundraising, she said memberships are one way to strengthen the museum’s finances. 

Stats pointed out that annual memberships are very affordable, at $35 per individual, $50 per family, and $100 for a North American Reciprocal Museum membership, which gives you free general admission to over 1,000 museums across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

In the long term, there are plans to use funds raised to revamp the permanent exhibits, but for now the priority is to fix elements in the building that are well past their prime: the elevator doesn’t work, the industrial fridge needs to be replaced, and the exhibits require better overhead lighting. 

Down the line, Stats envisions bringing more youth to the museum, from little ones coming on field trips and enjoying interactive exhibits to establishing a position for an education/youth advocate. She also wants to entice high schoolers to volunteer for the museum so they can learn from its deep reservoir of history. 

Transforming the Vallejo Museum into a thriving, well financed space may look challenging, but Stats, with her irrepressible enthusiasm and dynamic personality, is up for the task.

“It’s so imperative to me that people get that the reason we want them here is because it’s their space,” she argued passionately. “We’re not trying to sell you a membership to come see some exhibition. We’re selling you a membership to your own story. You’d be surprised how many people have no real idea where they are standing. And this is an amazing place to find out.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify Stats' co-founder of On the Fringe and her teaching certification.