Reading Rooms, Willow Creek MAX station

The next installment in the ongoing public art thing takes us out to the Willow Creek MAX station, out in the westside 'burbs, where we're taking a look at the station's oversized teracotta tables and chairs. TriMet's Blue Line Public Art Guide describes the furniture and the general theme of the stop:

Early plans for a library branch at this station inspired the theme of reading and literature. Though the library is no longer planned, the theme blossomed, resulting in the creation of several living rooms, places where one can curl up with a good book under the cherry trees. The cherry tree was chosen because of the role it has played in literature from different cultures.

Cast concrete furniture is clustered in groups. Literary references are sandblasted onto the backs of the chairs and on tabletops. Word scramble puzzles under the three shelters contain names of authors and characters from children’s books. Letters from the world’s alphabets are randomly tossed in seven locations along the bus and light rail platforms.

A September 1998 Oregonian piece by the paper's architecture critic (back in the olden days of yore when newspapers could afford architecture critics) offers a bit more detail, crediting Seattle artist Norie Sato for the design:

* Willow Creek/SW 185th Street: Although it had one of the smallest budgets, this station in a few years is apt to be one of the nicest. Using inexpensive, off-the-shelf Victorian-themed furniture, artist Sato created a series of outdoor "reading rooms" for a proposed branch library. The design team artists also successfully fought Tri-Met's objections to blooming trees, which require higher maintenance, to create a station worth an unplanned stop.

This post sat around in Drafts for several years before I finally figured out who designed it, which is one of those pesky little details I like to know before I hit 'Publish' if at all possible. If you look at the Tri-Met public art guide I linked to, you might notice that it generally offers little or no information about who created most of the art along the Blue Line. These glaring omissions were not accidental. As I mentioned in a 2018 post about the Milikan Way MAX station art, this is an enduring legacy of the silly late-80s and early-90s culture wars, back when right-wing busybodies had nothing better to do than fill their adult diapers over a few examples of controversial art funded by You, The American Taxpayer™. (If that era was before your time, or you just generally don't follow art news that closely, the Wiki bios of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano might be a good place to start.)

The important thing to know about that historical episode is that it happened right around Peak Gingrich, and so the GOP outrage led to a few years' moratorium on any new public art in all federally-funded projects, which was long enough for that particular culture war to blow over and the GOP to find something new to go shrieking about. If I recall correctly they switched over to impeaching the president for having an affair, while they were all quietly having affairs too, but that's a whole other story. The moratorium happened to coincide with the design work for phase 1 of the Westside MAX line, from downtown Portland out to 185th. So, officially, everything decorative along that stretch of track was considered Design and not Art. It was all, officially, a collaborative effort by the whole Westside MAX Design Team, each element contributing to a single unified (and uncontroversial) theme at each station. No individual credit was given, and if the individual bits of design had names, the public was not supposed to ever find out what they were called or who made them, or else the whole city gets stomped by a mile-high Gingrich kaiju or something. I mean, in reality that almost certainly won't happen; the Culture War industry currently has bigger fish to fry, like banning vaccines, and burning books, and persecuting non-Aryans, and ending democracy once and for all, forever. It's not that they aren't still mad about art; it's just that everyone who'd be detained for making decadent art is already destined for the camps for any number of other reasons. Besides, they have their own art and artists now, like this guy

As it turned out, the MAX line was delayed several years because tunneling through the West Hills turned out to be a lot more complicated than anyone had expected, and the federal ban actually expired a few years before the line opened. So they were able to tell us a few names and titles here and there, like Core Sample Time Line at the underground Washington Park station. Other info sorta-leaked out later via an obscure, now-defunct RACC web server (RACC being Portland's regional public art agency), as with Transplant at the Elmonica MAX station. That server was for the agency's "design roster", listing local artists with past experience handling public commissions and the bureaucratic stuff that comes with them, and a track record of getting quality work done on time and within budget. The program still exists, and a recent (2017-2020) collection of artists' resumes includes a couple of references to prior work on MAX projects a quarter-century ago, and to the Willow Creek station specifically, but that didn't give me enough to go on, and years went by until I took another look at this post and happened to search the library's newspaper database with exactly the right search terms.

The really sad thing about all this is that the proposed library never happened. They did open one at a different MAX stop closer to Hillsboro, but it closed after a few years, and the area even lost the longtime Tanasbourne Library after a bond measure for a new building failed, and the existing version of it lost its lease in a mini-mall on 185th & Evergreen and had nowhere to go, and now the only option nearby is the Aloha Community Library, a scrappy underdog nonprofit (as in, it gets zero government dollars and relies on volunteers to keep the doors open.) down at the shopping center at Kinnaman and Farmington, several miles away.