ECA and Public Process on Hiatus

As of the end of our Public Process 5 reception for William Ruller this past winter, ECA and our residency program will be on hiatus.

We’ve given up our Whiteaker neighborhood space in order to give ourselves time to consider new strategies and funding for our mission and goals.

Tough Town for Contemporary Art

As anyone involved with contemporary art in Eugene knows, it is very difficult to operate an artist space/gallery in our city. We have maintained a mission of serving emerging artists, along with offering the public an opportunity to engage our artists as they build their work during Open Studio nights. This has largely been a D.I.Y. operation run by Wes, Kari, and myself, and some amazing volunteers.  We consider our project successful, in that we have had consistent, high quality art production happening in our space every month since August of 2012. Events have been less successful, and attendance has ranged from a packed house to no one coming out for weeks on end, regardless of our marketing efforts.

To make a project like ours successful every month takes a lot of time and energy. Our idea came from a passion for contemporary art and a desire to add something valuable to our city. We still want this. But what started as a side project now requires more than what evenings and weekends will allow. Rather than let it barely exist, we’d rather put things on hold for the time being. Our artists are talented and hard working people, and they don’t require much — a quiet space to work and a place to show off what they do. Our space was perfect for them. But our mission has been about sharing their work, and exposing our city to emerging creative thought and practice. This alone requires financial support, people hours, and steady marketing. Building an audience for the kind of work we want to show requires a kind of planetary alignment we’ve not been able to tap into fast enough. Perhaps Eugene isn’t quite big enough yet. We certainly aren’t the first art organization in town to struggle. We believe these kinds of hurdles can be overcome, just not at the moment.

We are open to the right opportunities. If anyone is interested in a partnership to keep contemporary art access, practice, and production happening in our city please contact me at the email below, or through our contact page. If you are interested in our former space, I can put you in touch with the landlord.

We appreciate our friends, family, volunteers, financial supporters and the folks at The Eugene Weekly for all the support so far. We couldn’t have done any of this without you. For the time being we will not be accepting, or scheduling, any new shows or residencies. Please hang on to your submissions if you’ve been preparing one.

We want to stay in touch with all our patrons, supporters and artists! If you are not on our email list, please sign up for our email newsletter to find out what the next stage of ECA and Public Process will look like.

Courtney Stubbert

ECA Director, Curator, Co-Founder