Cultural Totem

A few photos of Cultural Totem, a public art piece at NE 14th & Alberta, created by artists Roslyn Hill and Lillian Pitt (who also co-created Salmon Cycle Marker at PSU. The description from its RACC page:

As artists, one Native American and one African American, we have made this contemporary totem to reflect our cultural and heritage stories, recognizing our many similarities.

Portland Public Art gave it a meh back in 2006, calling it "largely forgotten" and saying it "serves as a beginning, I guess".

Some years ago the city blocked 14th at Alberta as a traffic control measure, creating a sort of mini-plaza where the street dead-ends. There are a few trees here, and I took a couple of photos since it's the closest thing Alberta has to actual greenspace along the street. Maybe I only noticed this because it was a hot day, but Alberta doesn't have a lot of shady trees, and (unlike the Pearl District) the city didn't put in any sidewalk planters as the area gentrified. Maybe trees have gone out of fashion temporarily in the urban design world, I dunno.

Salmon Cycle Marker

The latest installment in Art Near PSU takes us to Salmon Cycle Marker, the tall decorated pole next to the university's Native American Student & Community Center on SW Jackson St. The Smithsonian Art Inventory page about it describes it:

A tall pole constructed from three trees killed by the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980-1981, depicts the journey of salmon in the Columbia Gorge from their birth to their arrival in the sea where they spawn. At the bottom of the pole there are images of salmon eggs created by Lillian Pitt and Ken MacKintosh; in the middle there is an image of "She Who Watches" by Lillian Pitt; and at the top there is an image of two salmon mating by Ken MacKintosh and an abstract image of a salmon looking up toward the sky.

Longtime reader(s) might remember me getting snarky more than once about Portland's fixation on salmon art, usually Heroic Salmon Swimming Upstream. I like this one, though, and I'm going to make an exception here. I note that Salmon Cycle Marker was co-created by a Native artist, whose website describes the project:

As with many of the large public projects I've worked on, I worked in collaboration with several other artists on this project.

It took a while to come up with the idea for what we were going to do, but we finally decided to have a giant marker. And then, once that idea came to us, it was like a powerful vision that kept driving us to completion.

The pole itself ... a 50 foot pole ... is a log from Mt. St. Helens that we found floating in the water. It must have been there since the time of the eruption. We thought that by using it we would not be destroying any living thing, and at the same time, we would be honoring all of the creatures and plant life that once lived on that mountain.

We put giant Salmon at the top of the pole because they were, and still are, so important to the lifeways of so many Native peoples throughout the Pacific Northwest. The salmon are huge ... 12 feet long ... but they don't look that big because they're so high up.

And we put Salmon eggs at the bottom of the pole ... and a number of other symbols going up the pole important to the Native peoples of this region.

It's nice that this isn't our usual Portland thing, where smug Subaru-driving white people babble on about magic salmon so they can look all twee and spiritual-ish. You may have seen me roll my eyes at that before, and I'm doing it again now.

Another work by Pitt and MacKintosh, titled The Salmon Offering, is a bronze cast of a traditional salmon drying rack. The City of Seattle described it, when it was exhibited there in 2001:

The Salmon Offering builds on the form of a traditional wooden salmon drying rack, which the artists adorned with their carvings. They dried fish on it, then dismantled the work and cast the parts in bronze. The bronze pieces will be reassembled on the site of the current salmon smoking area of the Native Center at Discovery Park. The artists will hand out salmon recipes at the annual PowWow of the United Tribes for All Indians.

Sculpture.org had this to say about it:

While all of the artists explored interconnections between our own survival and that of the salmon, Lillian Pitt, the only Native American artist, together with Ken Macintosh, went to the heart of the history of salmon in the culture of the Northwest. Salmon Offering, a bronze cast of an actual salmon drying rack, is installed near the salmon cooking area of the Daybreak Star Arts Center, owned by the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. The artists have donated the permanent work to United Indians in honor of Bernie Whitebear, the Native American leader who, with other native leaders, won land rights from the American government. The rack is the soul of a fish camp, where families come together to smoke and dry fish for the winter. It is also a focal point for telling myths and legends, sharing prayers, and trading with other tribes. As Pitt stated. “Salmon sustain more than the body—they feed the soul and spirit of a community.”

A quick note on terminology, you may have noticed that descriptions of Salmon Cycle Marker don't refer to it as a totem pole. The carving of totem poles was traditionally done by tribes in northern Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, and the practice didn't extend south to tribes in the Willamette Valley or along the Columbia River.

River Spirits

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So here's another of the munchkin-sized art parks along the MAX Yellow Line. This little spot of land is known as the Ainsworth Greenspace, because it sits at the corner of Ainsworth St. & Interstate Avenue. It's home to the sculpture you see here, "River Spirits"

TriMet describes the spot as:

Three tree totems with poetry written by students at Ockley Green Middle School surround a small plaza.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to describe them as totems, but I suppose they're sort of totem-ish, and they do have a sorta Northwest Indian theme, despite being made mostly out of rusting steel bits welded together.



One mildly curious thing is that although the place was created with your urban renewal transit dollars, it's not actually next to a MAX stop. You might catch a quick glimpse of it from the train as you speed by, but that's about it. Possibly someone just thought the corner could use a little sprucing up, and it's hard to disagree there. On one side you have a depressing 60's-era middle school that tends to bring up the rear in those pesky "No Child Left Behind" rankings. Right across the street there's a controversial and reportedly quite skeezy porn store.



I'm not 100% convinced the sprucing-up job is a success, though. If you number among this blog's femto-armada of Gentle Reader(s), you already know I'm not a huge fan of rust, not on cars, not on art, basically nowhere. Ok, so this particular sculpture has an intriguing texture if you look closely enough, or at least it does at present. But people look at you funny if you do that, and given the park's immediate neighborhood, you can sort of imagine why.

It's possible the place is a touch more cheery when the sun's out. Like that ever happens, I mean.



Look closely at the above photo for a moment. A little closer. There, that's good. You're getting sleeeeepy. So just relax and keep looking at the spiral. Now get out your credit cards and... No, I kid, I kid.



If you've been in Portland for any length of time, you've probably seen this face motif before in some form or other. It's derived from a locally iconic example of tribal rock art out in the Columbia Gorge. It's one of the very few such examples we've got around here, so we've sort of been beating it to death over the last decade or two, and it shows up everywhere, often without explanation. Like most people in the Northwest, I've never actually seen the original in person, although I think I saw it in HD on OPB once.

The other two river spirits are supposed to be a crow and a salmon. And sure, yes, they're proper native imagery and so forth, but when I see this stuff I always end up lamenting we don't have more interesting wildlife around these parts. Like snow monkeys, say, or wild parrots, or giant tortoises, or echidnas, just to name a few off the top of my head. I mean, salmon? Borrrrrringgggg.....