Whoops, there isn’t one! To find a city supporting the visual arts you have to visit Roseburg, Newport, Springfield, Corvallis and far-off Pendleton. 

In Pendleton, whose population is a tenth the size of Eugene’s, the nonprofit Pendleton Center for the Arts has operated since 2001 in a turn of the century Carnegie Library building owned by the city. The Pendleton Arts Council led a $1.8 million fundraising campaign to renovate the old building, which it operates under a 30-year lease from the city.

In Corvallis, with a population a little more than a third the size of Eugene, the private nonprofit Arts Center Corvallis has two exhibition spaces and an artist in residence program. It operates on city-owned land with substantial financial support from the city.

Roseburg, one seventh the size of Eugene, has the amazing Umpqua Valley Arts. It offers six gallery spaces, separate clay and multimedia studios, and a gift shop housed in a spacious historic building — a former old soldiers’ home now owned by the city.

The Newport Visual Arts Center was built by the city of Newport and opened in 1983 — a year after Eugene’s Hult Center — as a public art exhibition space and for art education programs. It has three galleries for exhibitions as well as classrooms.

And in Springfield, the nonprofit Emerald Arts Center was created by a determined group of artists and art lovers who — backed by the city — were able to buy and renovate a building on Main Street.

What’s Eugene got? The nonprofit Maude Kerns Art Center is wonderful, but it had to shut down its popular Art and the Vineyard festival last year because of lack of city support.

Eugene has an art gallery at City Hall and its new The Artists Space at the Hult. Yes, Eugene once had a city-supported art gallery. But the Jacobs Gallery, run for 18 years by a nonprofit organization in the lower level of the Hult Center, closed for good in 2016 after the city pulled its financial backing.