Six bus stops away from the bustle of UO campus lies the best kept open secret in Eugene-Springfield. For the last 17 years, Springfield-based art gallery Ditch Projects (Ditch for short) has been providing a space for contemporary art to thrive. The gallery showcases rotating exhibitions of the collective members and occasionally brings in artists and musicians the collective supports. While current social standards place high value on art valued by the populace, Ditch provides the last bastion for experimental art in the area.
Since the 1960s, Eugene has represented a West Coast ideal of American freedom. Through communities of hippies and cultural norms adjacent, many found themselves seeking freedom outside the structure of the East Coast. However, as musical movements thrived, the contemporary art scene didn’t have the chance to begin growing. By a stroke of luck, in 2008 a new guard of non-tenure track faculty decided to take matters into their own hands.
Six months after finishing his Masters in Fine Arts, Mike Bray, co-founder of the gallery, decided it was time to bring the Chicago punk scene he resonated with in his youth to Eugene/Springfield. Banding with a motley crew of fellow MFA students, the group struck out and founded Ditch.
The gallery, a reference to both its original construction and the Deitch projects — a SoHo gallery of contemporary artist Jeffrey Deitch — was a place for pushing the envelope of self expression. “We’re kind of a risk space,” Bray said. “If someone wants to come in and do something that’s a little unorthodox, we’re totally in support of that.”
A core aspect of the group’s ethos is accessible art. While their taste is cosmopolitan, exhibiting contemporaries like German duo Ubermorgen, the distinctly punk spirit of the collective opposes the highly commoditized pop art scene. They put on monthly cross-disciplinary exhibitions, ranging from fine art to performance art. “We are always first and foremost an artist’s art space,” Bray said “But I do think that art, music and film should all kind of interplay and intermix on occasion.”
In 2025 America, free art offerings are in the minority. Though the Ditch mission is a valiant one, their lack of budget is the primary reason why their campus engagement is minimal compared to operations like the JSMA. However, since its inception, cycles of intrigued groups of students who had done the digging required to happen upon the space would attend the exhibitions in packs.
“They kind of had this like ownership where you could tell that they knew this secret little spot,” Bray said. “They would be there for two years and attend every exhibition, but they’d almost not necessarily engage with Ditch. It was just their secret hideout.”
The combination of an extraordinary hideout-esque atmosphere of the gallery and the ebb-and-flow of student popularity has led to an audience primarily based out of New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. But Bray hopes more Eugene residents and students will get involved.
“We’d love for more people to come check it out and be involved,” Bray said. “I do think of it as a point of community where we want people to not only come and see it, but get in there and contribute too.”
The current exhibits “The Pattern Within the Pattern Within the Pattern” by Sonja Dahl and “So Long, Stranger” by Noah Greene will be up until March 2.
