Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Yankee Champion

Today's adventure takes us to the corner of SW Broadway & Montgomery, on the Portland State University campus, where we encounter Yankee Champion, a big stainless steel abstract sculpture next to the university's business school building. Gentle Readers may recall that I'm generally fond of this sort of thing. This one is a bit more... medical-looking than most, but hey. Or possibly dental. Or perhaps it's a very intricate and expensive German auto part.

Yankee Champion

I've been able to discover very little about it from the interwebs; here are the few morsels I've come across:

  • Two photos on the artist's website. His site notes that he switched from abstract to figurative sculpture in 1988. I like the abstract stuff better, but that's really a general personal preference rather than a comment on any particular work.
  • PSU's flickr stream has an artsy photo, and the UO Library has the same photo plus more info, and mentions that the artist is a prof at OSU.
  • A Scientific Commons page (which appears to be broken right now) describes it as: "A large, outdoor, shiny metal sculpture uniting a conglomerate of shapes supported by three irregularly shaped legs." Cached page here.

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

Yankee Champion

1 comment :

Unknown said...

"Medical" or "dental" are good descriptions. I always thought it resembled something that might be used in executions, or perhaps some form of elaborate torture.