Untitled (1978)

Some of you might remember that I used to do a lot of public art posts here a few years ago. That's not really where I'm focused right now, but I still have a few sitting around in drafts, so don't be surprised if a few posts like this one show up among all the semi-rugged outdoor stuff every so often. This time around I've got a few photos (as in exactly three photos) of another Lee Kelly sculpture I stumbled across a while back. This one is fairly small and sits outside the west entrance to St. Vincent Hospital in Portland's West Hills. I was picking someone up at the time, and they were only interested in going home, and I can't exactly ask people to wait while I work out the best camera angles for maximal artsiness, and I'm not up for making special trips and visiting hospitals for the art during a pandemic.

Like a lot of things Kelly made in the 70s, this one simply goes by Untitled. One of the photos clearly shows a date of 1975 on it, and this post originally had 1975 in the title, but a walk/bike/drive tour brochure from the Portland Art Museum's 2010 Kelly exhibititon has a date of 1978 on it. Kelly was in the loop on this retrospective so presumably he would know the right year. Maybe that's the year it sold, versus the year it was made, I dunno. More importantly, there's already a much larger Untitled (1975) of his out there, albeit located in a park in Seattle. Which makes me want to go with 1978 just for the sake of disambiguation. And neither of these should be confused with another Untitled circa 1974, outside a bank branch at NE 72nd & Fremont, or the Untitled (1973) at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, or the Untitled Fountain that's picked up the name "Kelly Fountain" over time, on downtown Portland's transit mall. That's a lot of Untitleds, and I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here. But in all fairness, if I was called upon to come up with names for them, I have no idea how I'd go about doing that. Maybe just randomly generate some names, or train a neural net on a bunch of modern art names, and invite people to people read whatever they like into the results, I dunno.

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