ArtSpace was created by Uni High Art Teacher Karen Hellyer while enrolled in a graduate-level course NCSA's Education and Outreach Group offered during the Spring of 1994, right after Mosaic Beta was released. The mission was to provide global exhibition of student art work while distributing visual arts curriculum to educators with access to the web. At the time, the web was a commercial-free frontier, and there wasn't another "ArtSpace" to be found. Since then, many have cropped up, but this is the site that first coined the phrase. Be sure to see the Kudos received from various arts people over the years.

This version of Artspace was remodelled during the 1996-1997 school year by independent-study student Usama Hajj. Usama went on to study design at the University of Illinois, subsequently developing the original sketches for the Segway, a personal human transporter. He is currently working as a User Interface / Human Interaction Designer at Apple Computer Inc.