"TriMet" (MHCC)

I recently had a wander around the Mt. Hood Community College campus in east Gresham, which I hadn't visited before, and ran across this familiar sculpture in its new home. This is Robert Maki's TriMet (1977), which is named for the local transit agency because it used to be located on the bus mall in downtown Portland. From 1977 til the start of Green Line MAX construction, it was the centerpiece of the so-called Bathtub Fountain, which was removed for the new rail line. After that line opened, the sculpture was briefly located outside one of the Standard Insurance buildings downtown, still on the bus mall but now without a fountain, which is when I took photos for a previous post about it. Apparently it wasn't suitable for that location, for reasons still unknown to me, and left town for suburbia while that post sat in Drafts. I didn't know where it went until a commenter pointed out it was at MHCC now. That's a bit of a drive for me so I didn't rush out immediately to go find it, but I eventually realized there was other art on campus to look at, and a Metro natural area next door to visit, so I wandered around taking photos for an afternoon. Which was nice, except for being followed around by an overzealous security guy in his tactical golf cart. Maybe he saw me taking photos of the art and figured I was some kind of gentleman art thief, scoping the campus for an elaborate heist, like something out of a 1960s David Niven film. I mean, it's much more likely that he was just bored and on a power trip, randomly picking out people to hassle, and has probably never seen or heard of 1960s heist films, but I like the art heist explanation better and am going to go with that.