Sunday, January 06, 2013

Begin Again Corner

The ongoing tour of Portland transit mall art takes us to Begin Again Corner, better known as the corner of SW 5th & Columbia. The piece consists of fern designs by Anne Storrs and a Kim Stafford poem inscribed onto one corner of the Fifth Avenue Building, a former state office building built in 1951. RACC describes the piece thusly:

The artist’s images of a sword fern’s from fiddlehead to skeletal form, are combined with Kim Stafford’s site specific poem about turning a corner. Eleven individual or groups of sword ferns are sandblasted into the building’s granite surface.

Beyond the design itself, which I rather like, the piece adds a bit of a street-level presence to what used to be another windowless, blind corner. I'll probably never understand why they thought that was a great design feature back in 1951.

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