Grover Cleveland Park • Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa

Next up we're visiting downtown Honolulu's Grover Cleveland Park, named after the rather obscure 19th century president.

Cleveland is honored by a park in Hawaii for a rather unusual reason. He took office shortly after the 1893 coup that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani. Cleveland strongly opposed the coup and refused to annex the islands, following the scathing Blount Report on what had happened. As it turns out, Honolulu's Thomas Square is named for a similar reason. In that case, a British admiral who reversed an unauthorized seizure of the islands by an ambitious subordinate who did a bit of freelancing while Thomas was out of the area. Cleveland was succeeded in office by Republican William McKinley, who annexed the islands shortly after taking office and who -- controversially -- still has a high school named for him nearby.

Technically it's not really a city park, just a landscaped plaza with a fountain outside the state Attorney General's office and the Department of Labor & Industrial Relations, across the street from the state Supreme Court.

There aren't a lot of other parks and monuments dedicated to the memory of Grover Cleveland around the country, much less the world, but there's a much larger example located in Caldwell, NJ, his hometown.

The fountain in the middle of the plaza is titled Ka Hoʻoilina Mau Loa (The Eternal Legacy), created in 1994 by local artist Donald Harvey, who also did the similar Wave Flight at the airport. A public art walking tour brochure from the nearby Hawaii State Art Museum briefly describes the fountain:

The sculpture symbolizes Kamehameha the Great, Ruth Ke'elikolani, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and the generous legacy they have left behind to the people of Hawai'i. Both women are suggested in the center form, inspired by the Hawaiian crab claw sail design. The three outer forms are an abstraction of the bows of ancient Hawaiian double-hulled canoes and sails.

And here's a Facebook video of the fountain running since I forgot to take one of my own.

Reconfigurations

I just happened to be at Mt. Tabor fairly regularly last summer because of a weekly-ish electronic music thing there, and around last July I noticed there was suddenly a new walkway connecting the SW corner of the park to Division St., basically a car-free extension of SE 64th Ave., between the big Portland Parks nursery and maintenance yard and a large retirement community to the west. On taking a closer look I realized the new walkway included some new public art, so I took a few photos and poked around on the interwebs for a bit, and a new art post was born.

This is called Reconfigurations, and it's credited to a number of local artists. Here's the description from that Public Art Archive page -- which is apparently where info on RACC art goes now, instead of the RACC maintaining their own database. (This move may be a good thing in general, assuming Public Art Archive has stable funding and won't randomly go belly-up and disappear right when I need some info from their site, and the Wayback Machine is archiving their pages. Unfortunately this humble blog contains a lot of now-broken links to the old RACC website that probably need to be updated at some point. Anyway, here's their description of what's going on here:

Three sculptures inhabit a new path leading into Mount Tabor Park. Each sculpture consists of one very granite boulder sawn cleanly in half. At each sculpture the two boulder halves will be arranged in different ways, both in relation to each other and to the newly planted tree.Six Oregon writers collaborated to create a poem that is engraved on the sawn stones faces of each sculpture, to be experienced as one traverses the path. The resulting compositions of trees, stones and words will bring people's attention to the slow but steady ongoing natural process of trees growing happening all around us, and help local residents stay engaged with the natural processes and park landscape they visit over and over again. The pieces will also act as touchstones accompanying residents and the community over their lifetime. How the sculptures evolve will be for us to imagine, and future generations to experience. Those future Portlanders will in turn try to picture how these artifacts started out long ago.

The RACC announcement for the walkway's July 2024 grand opening describes the concept a bit more clearly: ...three pairs of stones engraved with written text each with a tree in the middle which will eventually move (reconfigure) the placement of the stones over time.

This might be the first time I've heard of a project designed to be slowly pushed around by tree roots over time. As in most cities, tree roots can be a real public nuisance here, for lifting and cracking sidewalks, infiltrating all sorts of underground pipes. But Portland also has a bureau-level city agency dedicated to protecting trees at all costs. Which has led to some weird "only in Portland" incidents over the years, those things that are easily demagogued by the sort of people who already bear ill will toward the city.

The other big thing that happened around the same time on Division was the grand opening of the city's first BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) service, though the rapid part is a bit... debatable. Which leads to my one ad only complaint about the project, which is that the shiny new FX2 bus rolls right past the artsy new park entrance without stopping, and the closest stops are about four blocks away in either direction. Because apparently the Parks Bureau and TriMet couldn't be bothered to coordinate their efforts even the tiniest little bit. I may be misremembering, but I could swear that public agencies used to be better at this.

Anyway, for more info about all of this, here are some links to websites of the artists, and specifically to pages on their involvement in the project, where available:

• Adam Kuby
• Stephanie Adams-Santos
• Samiya Bashir
• Trevino Brings Plenty
• Anis Mojgani
• Sam Roxas-Chua
• Dao Strom

Knight of Tomorrow 574

The next public art we're having a look at is Knight of Tomorrow 574, by NYC artist Linda Stein, on the Portland State campus next to the university's "Walk of Heroines". Here's her description of it, via a university art page:

Knight of Tomorrow 574, made of bronze, represents the heroism of all women by signifying an “everywoman” who has met the challenges of history and contemporary life. My participation in Portland State University’s Walk of the Heroines is a natural progression in my own goals as a feminist artist honoring the heroism of women in all societies and all eras. It is partly a response to running from my Ground Zero studio during 9/11. This experience­–combined with childhood fears, my feminist abhorrence for gender inequality, and our contemporary culture of Perpetual War–led me to contemplate themes of Protection, Parity and Peace. My feelings of vulnerability, insecurity and powerlessness coalesced into a desire to create an iconic form that symbolized the strong, protective, heroic female image providing the sense of safety I sought, and a symbol of our humanity.

As you might have guessed from the 574 in the name, this is part of a long-running "Knights of Protection" series, including (apparently) at least one other copy of Knight of Tomorrow 574 in a scenic waterfront location in Boca Raton, FL, which came up briefly in a wider 2015 interview.

In a weird pop culture side note, Stein had a cameo role in the original Borat movie, in a segment where Borat tries to interview Western feminists about something or other. Stein wasn't in on the joke at the time, and later told the BBC "He may do better with homophobia and racism, but he just didn't do very well with sexism", and indeed she was flooded with angry emails from men who had enjoyed the segment unironically. This was a somewhat early example of the toxic obsessive dudes who seem to plague every corner of the internet these days.

To me this episode sort of crystalizes what's wrong with the Borat character and the whole subtype of satire where you satirize a thing by just doing more and more of it and hoping the audience figures out it's a joke at some point. If the people you're satirizing enjoy it unironically and aren't even a little bit offended by it, maybe it isn't landing the way you intended.