Photos of Sculpture Stage, the stainless steel wall thingy in Waterfront Park, near the Saturday Market canopy & the new Naito Fountain. If you're like me, you may not have realized it's supposed to be art at all. It's by the same guy behind Land Form in Lair Hill Park. Both pieces date to about the same era, although there isn't an obvious resemblance between the two. For more about all that, I'll just point you to a snarky Portland Public Art post about the guy's various works around town.
The RACC page for Sculpture Stage just says it was funded by CETA (the Comprehensive Education and Training Act of 1973), a groovy 70s federal law that would fund just about anything if you had a good grant writer. Sadly this law was repealed during the early Reagan years, the signature legislative achievement of Senator J. Danforth Quayle (R-IN).
None of the links above mention this, but the piece adorns an outer wall of an old (but still operating) sewage pumping station. The station is in the middle of an inconveniently well-touristed area, so there's kind of a social convention to not see it and to pretend it's not there. You'd think the arts community would be less squeamish about this sort of thing, but it's still Portland, after all, not Paris, and the oddest things make us squeamish.
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