Who We Are

Created by the School of Art at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 2016, Greensboro Project Space (GPS) is an off-campus, multi-purpose art space and satellite gallery in downtown Greensboro, which acts as a bridge between students and faculty in the School of Art and the Greensboro community. Roughly half of our programs are by students and faculty in the School of Art, and half are split between a diverse range of local artists, community members and organizations. 

Off-Campus

GPS invites UNCG students and faculty to connect and to engage with our local community. Our off-campus location plays a key role in expanding accessibility to the arts and acts as a site for engagement to have critical dialogue by actively facilitating connections, resulting in an increased amount of exchange and collaboration.

GPS serves a vital role in the art students’ educational experience and functions as an additional site for teaching and learning. In addition to the traditional exhibition opportunities for student artists, GPS also serves as a site for professional field-related internships, encourages student-initiated and curated group exhibitions, hosts class visits and supports in-process experimentation, offers an annual undergraduate student residency program, and acts as a place for collaboration across disciplines to easily take place. In the spirit of accessibility, GPS has also designed a free “Wayfinding Guide: From Campus to Community” zine, to encourage students to find their way downtown either by local bus, biking, or walking.

It also acts as a neutral space and a base for community-engaged initiatives that the University has created. Not only does GPS act as a site for engagement, but it actively helps facilitate connections between a variety of partner organizations, community members, educators, and students. 

Interdisciplinarity 

GPS is proud to serve as a creative platform that is dedicated to building community, creating opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary and collaborative practices, and encourage artistic growth, risk taking, and experimentation, which are integral skills for a life in the arts. This endeavor validates the ideas that the arts are, and continue to be, a thread that connects our institution and that an off-campus art space can be a place to share with the outside world the creativity that is inherent in our pursuits.

While GPS was created to connect UNCG School of Art students to communities off-campus, there are many communities on-campus that students don’t regularly engage with. Because of this, there has been a large emphasis on inviting other Departments, Colleges, Schools, and Offices at UNCG to use GPS as a public and creative platform. Through this, GPS acts as a space for School of Art students to interact with people, communities, and ideas outside of their physical and conceptual surroundings. This also allows the Greensboro community to get a unique window into the creative endeavors of a variety of programs at the University, particularly within the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Never Fully-Booked... 

… for our UNCG students and faculty! At GPS we consistently strive to be never fully booked for students who want to utilize the space. We pursue this by primarily hosting shorter exhibits, leveraging strategic programming by intentionally overlapping and connecting exhibits and performances, separating our space in unique ways, and providing off-site exhibition spaces.  Students respond to what is happening in the world and need a place to create art in response now, not later. This initiative encourages students to take risks, embrace their spontaneous nature, and use GPS as a public laboratory to work out their ideas in real time and space. 

For our community artists and organizations, who round out a portion of our annual programming, we have a separate submission process that does not follow the same “never fully booked” motto. If you are a community artist or member interested in using our space, we have two submission windows each year for solo or group exhibition proposals. For more information about the submission process and procedures, please visit our “Use the Space” page to learn more.

We do, however, accept pop-up and one-off performance or event proposals on a rolling basis, and happy to find a way to incorporate them within our programming year-round!