lee kelly sculpture at salishan

Ok, so here's another post that's been lurking in my Drafts folder for ages. During a summer 2014 trip to the Oregon Coast, I stayed at the groovy 60s hotel at Salishan for a few days, and (though I hadn't planned it this way) got a couple of blog posts out of it. The latter post was about a print on the wall in my hotel room, and in it I mentioned something about the hotel's developer being a big patron of the arts, both at the hotel & elsewhere. Among other things, he was responsible for the ginormous Lee Kelly sculpture along the Willamette river in the Johns Landing area, plus the 60s & 70s-era art all over the hotel grounds. Which brings us to the above photo. The sculpture pictured is in a courtyard outside the hotel's conference center, and as soon as I saw it I thought, hey, wait, I think I know who made that, and (for good or ill) I've tracked down a lot of his stuff over the lifetime of this humble blog. Unfortunately the courtyard was taped off for an event and I couldn't get any closer to it, and ended up with just the one photo.

I figured that would be fine, and I could just Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos it when I got home & flesh out the post from there. So I tried that, and... not so much. I found a 1981 Oregonian article about the hotel, which confirmed the thing is a Kelly, and said it went in around 1977... but it didn't mention what it's called. The usual procedure here is that I need to know a name, otherwise I don't have a blog post title, and untitled posts are stuck in Drafts limbo until that little problem gets sorted. But as far as I can tell that one little factoid doesn't exist anywhere on the interwebs. I tried again just now and all I found was someone else's photo of it, from a better angle but again without a name. I suppose I could have just called or emailed the hotel and asked them, like some sort of wild and crazy extrovert (who doesn't mind coming off as a weirdo), but I've come this far in the blog (non-)industry without resorting to, y'know, interacting with people, so why start now? Especially since there's a very good chance it's just called "Untitled" anyway. So this post has sat around in Drafts for close to four years now, which is a bit much. So I'm going to go ahead and declare a statute of limitations on unsolved minor mysteries that nobody else cares about, and post this anyway.

And hey, if you happen to know the answer, the comments are open. I actually just re-enabled anonymous comments as a goodwill gesture for the GDPR era. The new regulations don't actually require that, but I just wanted to emphasize that while Google/Blogspot and Flickr might do tracking stuff with cookies (and I have no control over that), I don't have access to that data and I personally don't track anything or anyone, and have zero interest in doing so. I also don't have or want anyone's email address, phone number, pager, fax, telex, etc., and wouldn't use them if I somehow had them (even if it would help with a blog post title). Hell, I've been known to repeatedly forget the names of coworkers I've worked with for years. I mention all this because my Blogspot dashboard was badgering me to do or say something official about GDPR compliance, so here you go.