Today's local public art object is Clement Meadmore's Split Ring, at SW 10th & Jefferson on the grounds of the Portland Art Museum. This may be my favorite sculpture in the whole city. I realize monumental abstract stuff isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it's not exactly the fashionable thing these days, and there are certainly a lot of abstract public artworks I don't care for. But Split Ring just seems right somehow. Maybe it has something to do with the museum, rather than the city, buying it. It's possible the museum curators have better taste (you'd hope so), and don't feel the same pressure to buy locally.
Back in college, I used to wait for the bus home at the old 10th & Jefferson TriMet stop, which was right next to Split Ring. I never got tired of looking at it. I was about to say there's something clean and mathematical about it, and then discivered there was a post about it (and a few other Meadmore works) at Ivars Peterson's excellent Mathematical Tourist blog. So it's not just me. I guess that's the key point here.
Like a lot of modern sculptures, this is one of a small series of identical pieces. I'm not sure how many exist total, but here are a few sightings I came across on the interwebs:
- Another Split Ring graces the Woodland Mall in Grand Rapids, Michigan. No, really.
- A third one sold at auction in 2008 in Melbourne, Australia, fetching a cool $81,000 (Australian dollars, presumably). Which is actually somewhat less than I would have expected.
- A Split Ring appears on the cover of a recent book LARGE SCALE: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. The photo credit indicates it might be the Portland copy before it arrived here. The link goes to an interesting and non-art-jargony interview with the book's author.
- Apparently the sculpture later gave rise to Meadmore's Split Ring 2D, a related abstract silkscreen print design.
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