Whitespace Gallery

The story

If you walk down Edgewood Avenue in Inman Park, you'll pass a late-19th-century Victorian house and assume it's just another preserved residential residence. Slip past the side gate into the backyard, though, and you'll discover an 1893 brick carriage house operating as one of Atlanta's most intrepid contemporary art venues. Owner Susan Bridges spent decades working in advertising and staging guerilla pop-up art shows in raw, unconventional spaces across the city—churches, shipping containers, U-Haul facilities, and underground parking decks—before early-2000s real estate developments swallowed her favorite temporary haunts.

Rather than retreat, Bridges turned to her own property. In 2005, she hired Atlanta architecture firm BLDGS to convert the 1890s carriage house behind her home into a permanent gallery. The design preserves the structure's rough-hewn brick and heavy wood timber framing while inserting razor-sharp white gallery walls for rotating exhibitions. Over time, Bridges expanded the property into a miniature creative compound, carving out "whitespec"—a former cellar transformed into a project room for student and emerging artists—and "shedspace," a former root cellar dedicated to immersive, site-specific installations.

Because the gallery is tucked behind a private house, it functions—as Atlanta Magazine noted—"like a speakeasy in the bright sunshine." You won't encounter sterile museum guards here; instead, opening receptions feel like high-concept backyard garden parties beneath the trees, often complete with food trucks and themed cocktails. It remains a rare, deeply intimate venue where non-commercial fiber art, experimental video, and provocative sculpture live discreetly in a quiet residential neighborhood.