Spatio-political attunement at the intersections of campus and community: Confronting the (im)perceptible at the site of two youth art programs

In this article, we revisit two youth art programs we facilitated at the Athenaeum, the University of Georgia’s contemporary art gallery located at the border of campus and downtown. One program was a youth-led social practice initiative connected to a dissertation study; the other was an after-school art program embedded within an art education course. Initially, we understood the gallery site as a promising location for fostering campus and community connections. However, as the programs unfolded, we encountered material-discursive forces that revealed the spatial politics of the site to be far more complicated than we had anticipated. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s theorization of spatial politics and a critical place inquiry framework by Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, we reexamine our initiatives through a spatio-political lens attentive to past-present entanglements. We explore how histories of institutional racism, economic disparity, and town–gown divisions shaped our educational efforts. We also turn to Katherine McKittrick’s work to examine how our positions as white, university-affiliated women facilitated our complicity in perceiving the site as transparent and neutral. Ultimately, we argue for cultivating an ethical spatial response-ability in art education—one that recognizes place and space as active agents shaping pedagogical and artistic practice.