Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Redd/XOXO Mural

The mural shown above recently appeared on an old industrial building at SE 8th & Salmon, within the last few weeks. It's an otherwise drab old industrial building, and I seem to recall that (until recently) it had sat abandoned for years. It was recently purchased by the Pearl District's Ecotrust Foundation; they've dubbed it "The Redd", and they plan to transform it into a sort of incubator for boutique foodie businesses. Which sounds both incredibly twee and probably delicious at the same time. They haven't started on the remodel just yet, but a couple of weeks ago the building hosted this year's XOXO Festival, a sort of technology/culture/media shindig for people who are vastly cooler and hipper and more elite than I will ever be. I do follow a few people who attended on Twitter, so I'm only about one degree of separation from techno-l33tness, but still.

It's not immediately obvious, but the mural design incorporates the letters "XOXO". It was created by Bay Area artist Erik Marinovich, and the design was also used for the festival's official t-shirt. I'm going to guess they won't keep the mural when the building gets transmogrified into a foodie utopia. And if they do a new one, it'll be all Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream or something along those lines.

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