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:
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