Anhinga

Next up in obscure public art, we're taking a trip down to industrial Milwaukie, home to the Oregon Liquor & Cannabis Commission head office, which consists of a low-rise midcentury office building attached to the state's vast central booze warehouse. In front of the office is a small midcentury concrete pond and (I think) water fountain, which was almost completely dry when I swung by. On a pedestal in the middle of the pond is a roughly life-sized statue of an anhinga, a heron-like bird native to South America and parts of the US East Coast. This was created by the artist Wayne Chabre, whose work has appeared here a few times before, largely at MAX stations and Multnomah County offices.

As a state agency, the OLCC is required by state law to spend 1% of the budget of any big capital project on art, whether they really want to or not, which is how the Anhinga came to be here. And as part of the state's public art collection it has a has a Public Art Archive page, which doesn't have a photo of it, but says it's from 2017 and describes it briefly:

A cast bronze representation of an Anhinga bird perches on a rock with wings outstretched in the feather-drying pose in the spring-fed pond to the north of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission headquarters. Acquired through Oregon's Percent for Art in Public Places Program, managed by the Oregon Arts Commission.

I did run across a couple of photos of another anhinga statue, seemingly an identical copy of the one here, but located in Florida instead. Which is at least in the bird's natural range. Before I stopped by to take a few semi-obligatory photos, I had some snarky remarks lined up and ready to go. At first I thought it was an uninspired and odd choice, and figured they just called around until they found a local artist who happened to have suitable unsold inventory that week at the right price point.. I was about to say that a less puritanical agency in a less puritanical state could have a lot of fun with alcohol-themed art. Maybe commission some whimsical kinetic art on the subject of beer goggles, or maybe flair bartending, or Henry Weinhard's proposal to have Portland's Skidmore Fountain re-piped to serve beer, or who knows what. I was going to go with the snark angle, but then I swung by to take these photos and realized the anhinga's awesome and terrifying hidden superpower, so I'll tell you all about that instead.

You see the feather-drying pose the statue is in? Note how it bears an uncanny resemblance to a Canada goose dominance pose, and then look at the geese sorta-clustered around it. Sure enough, the statue had attracted a small cadre of geese as its devoted cult followers, transfixed by its pure radiance and unable to turn away and leave the statue's presence, while also not getting too close to The Anhinga because just look at it. See how incredibly dominant it is? It just stands there with its wings out, ready to rumble, defeating all challengers without moving a muscle, standing its ground and not flinching even a little no matter how many humans stroll on by. The geese were clearly very impressed by this display, and continued to hang out here even though their little pond had just about dried up. Because of course The Anhinga is the Chosen One and will provide a newer and better pond for its flock of true believers if the need ever truly arises.

Elsewhere on the internet, and semi-related, here's a Reddit thread about how to assert manly-man dominance over a flock of geese, because Reddit. Most replies repeat the internet-wide onventional wisdom that this is impossible, but these people had clearly never heard of the anhinga statue trick. He who controls the anhinga, controls the goose. And in Oregon the OLCC controls The Anhinga, god help us all.

Which begs the obvious question: Exactly why has the OLCC built a small army of fanatical trained geese? What are they planning? And do they really need that many geese just to enforce state liquor laws? I mean, I can see how geese would be really useful in chasing down drunk boaters. And yeah, breaking up bar fights and ejecting unruly patrons when the bouncer isn't up to the job is right up in their wheelhouse, if The Anhinga so wills it. Swarming hapless grocery clerks en masse if they ever sell a hard seltzer to a 20 year old, or fail to card a 55-year-old grandma? Also an ideal job for geese. Honking at 200 decibels to ruin hip hop concerts? Flapping and hissing at any shenanigans in the Champagne Room? Geese. You and I may or may not approve, but the more you think about it, you have to admit there's a certain logic to the idea.

But it won't stop there. It never does. As The Anhinga's fame continues to grow and its army of believers swells, the state will look for and find more ways to employ them. Playing chess for money in the park? Geese. Unpaid library fines from before COVID? Also geese. And before long every billionaire will have a private goose armada, mostly for status, and then cheap knockoff anhinga statues will hit the market and the longtime head of your HOA will install one and start enforcing the CC&Rs with geese. And then one day, maybe years from now, maybe decades, the geese will discover they've been tricked into worshiping a false idol all this time, and then the great rebellion begins...

Wind Gate

Next up, we're still on the Reed campus after looking at Trigger 4 and Seljuk, the college's two Lee Kelly rust sculptures. We're done with Kellys for now, but we've got one more midcentury abstract thing to look at while we're here, this time a sorta-organic shape that sits on the college's very large front lawn. The 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it:

This big hunk of bronze has been here quite a while. No idea who the artist is. I can remember seeing Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsburg sitting a few yards from here, surrounded by a few thousand frolickers + adherents in 1967. Summer of Love, baby.

Apparently this is a bit of a campus landmark, and a basic search of the interwebs quickly returned the title and artist info I was looking for. So this is Wind Gate, by Portland sculptor Hilda Morris, who also did Ring of Time outside the Standard Insurance Plaza tower in downtown Portland (which has always been one of my favorites, and which secretly doubles as an interdimensional portal across space and time, if you know the trick), and Winter Column at the Portland Art Museum.

According to Confidential Sources that I am not just making up on the fly, Wind Gate is a sort of miniature portal that just moves air around. It was thought that a full-scale people-moving portal was overkill since nobody was all that interested in leaving campus no matter how easy it was, but a device that brought in balmy tropical breezes while the outside world endured ice storms, and bracing arctic air during heat waves, now that sounded fantastic, in theory. In practice it was immediately repurposed for venting weed smoke off to somewhere else, initially to avoid detection by The Man (for the first week or two, until it became clear The Man didn't care) and after that it was to save the world. Which I realize sounds crazy at first, but let me try to explain, to the degree that I understand the situation:

I'm unable to confirm this part, but as the story goes, shortly after Wind Gate was activated, a Classics professor learned to control the device and configured it to always vent into some cave or deep chasm at Delphi, in ancient Greece, on his personal theory that the Oracle's enigmatic prophesies were caused by great clouds of weed smoke from the future. Which honestly is just a variant on the more common ethylene gas theory, if you really think about it. Furthermore, Reed was the only known institution that a.) was capable of generating that much smoke, and b.) had a portal for sending it across the Atlantic and back in time, where it was needed. Therefore students would now have to shoulder the burden of keeping the Oracle baked on a long-term basis. There was no way for people on the present-day side of the portal to tell what time of day it was on the other side, or whether the Oracle was going to be prophesying soon or about what, or whether she was even in the cave at any given time, and letting her go ahead and try to tell the future while sober risked altering our timeline in untold but probably catastrophic ways. And that's why, ever since that realization over 50 years ago now, there has always been at least one brave student volunteer (and often a whole crowd) near the portal 24/7/365, in all weather conditions, smoking as much weed as possible and trying to keep the Oracle properly hotboxed at all times, just in case a visitor shows up asking what to do about the Persians.

Seljuk

Fresh on the heels of Trigger 4, here are a few photos of Seljuk, the other Lee Kelly on the Reed College campus. The Walking Tour I keep referencing says this one is from 1996, which seems a bit late to still be working in Cor-Ten steel. Kelly did eventually (mostly) switch to stainless steel sometime in the 2000s, and I do like those a bit better, but if you just want to wallow in pure 1970s-ness you need to find one of the Cor-Ten ones. Maybe sit nearby and just vibe with the art, maybe bring some twine and practice your macramé knots while vibing with the art, I dunno, whatever floats your boat. It's between the library and the Education Technology building, which I guess is the computer lab building. This is the school that Steve Jobs dropped out of before starting Apple (another factoid from of my extremely small stockpile of Reed trivia), so I suppose they can call their computer lab building whatever they want.

No, I do not know why it's called Seljuk. To me it doesn't look particularly Turkish, or Persian, or any flavor of Central Asian. Maybe it was inspired by the Robo-Seljuk Empire of the late 21st Century, and Kelly was trying to warn us about what's coming.

The 2006 Portland Public Art blog post that covered the other large outdoor art on campus didn't mention this one. Maybe the author just missed it somehow, or was lost and thought they were back at Trigger 4 again, just seeing it from a different angle. Having two Kellys on the same campus really seems like... gilding the lily? Or sort of like gilding, except you're applying rust instead of gold, and there may not be a common word for that.

Trigger 4

One of the longest-running themes here on this weird little website involves tracking down public art by the prolific Portland-area sculptor Lee Kelly. Not because I'm a huge fan of his work, but because... well, it's complicated. I tried to explain the situation in a couple of posts last year, about his Sulawesi and Icarus at Kittyhawk, and I don't really have any fresh insights to add as to why this ongoing project exists and why I keep tracking down stuff of his every now and then. It may be because nobody graduates art school in 2024 wanting to make giant abstract whatzits out of rusty Cor-Ten steel, and encountering one of Kelly's thingamajigs in the wild feels like encountering a live brachiosaurus while out for a walk. They're huge, and dumb, and they're relics of a bygone age that's never coming back, but they and their kind once dominated the planet somehow, which makes them oddly fascinating in their own way.

In the last couple of posts in this series, I mentioned a Walking Tour of Lee Kelly art, which was put together for a 2010 Portland Art Museum retrospective. I hadn't looked at that map for a while, but I was reminded of it again a few weeks ago, and remembered that there were two Kellys on the Reed College campus, so I figured I'd go find them. I had not actually been there before; like a lot of private liberal arts colleges, it operates in its own little bubble. Students tend not to stray far from campus, and as far as I know there isn't much on campus to pull in "townies" (do they even use that word? I have no idea.) The college only seems to make the local news when there's a problem with their undergraduate-run nuclear reactor, which doesn't happen very often.

So of the two Kellys, we're starting with Trigger 4 (1979), because the brief walking tour entry said it's in front of the Studio Arts building, which is next to the east parking lot, so you should park there. This being the sort of walking tour where you mostly have to drive between the many stops, because his stuff is freakin' everywhere. Anyway, it was quite easy to pinpoint Trigger 4 on Google Maps with this info, since it's big enough to be visible from space and all.

A 2006 Portland Public Art blog post describes it briefly but vividly:

Big lunk of a Lee Kelly off the East parking lot, a Balder before the art department. I imagine some poor Martian anthropologist trying to puzzle these things out in 1700 years. Why? Why did they venerate the piles of iron?

That about sums it up. Frankly I can't think of anything to add to that.

Monkey, New Columbia

Next up in the ongoing public art thing, we're looking at a kinda-disturbing monkey statue located outside the New Columbia Apartments complex, across the street from McCoy Park in North Portland. This was created by Nigerian-born artist Mufu Ahmed, who also did the squirrel and salmon park benches over in the park. I really liked those, so maybe my issue with this one is that monkeys are inherently kind of disturbing. The internet says this is one of three Ahmed animal statues at the apartment complex, the others being a heron and a lizard, possibly gecko, or maybe a chameleon. I'm going to go with chameleon, based solely on the fact that it's located just steps away from the monkey and I apparently walked right past it without noticing.

This post was stuck in Drafts for years because I didn't have the info in the last paragraph (including, frankly, what it's supposed to be; I was thinking it was some kind of unholy hybrid, possibly a greyhound with a human face). Repeated internet searches over time failed to return any useful results, and I had largely given up on solving this one. But the search engine gods were off their game recently and allowed an actually useful result to sneak into the first dozen pages or so of ads and irrelevant results and general spam. It turns out the info I was looking for has been out there on the internet this entire time, in a 2006 post on the old Portland Public Art blog. Said blog has been "on hiatus" since 2009 and somehow, every now and then, it still turns out to have the answers I'm looking for when nobody else does. I don't know anything at all about the mysterious "C" behind the blog, but I hope they're enjoying their extended hiatus and are out living their best life.

On that note I should probably say something about the other art you can see if you make the trek to McCoy Park to gawk at the weird monkey statue. Across the street to the west, McCoy Park is home to a kid-friendly fountain, along with the aforementioned benches, a moon-n-stars inlay in the sidewalk, and an art fence around the park's community garden.

The community center across the street to the south also has some art to look at, like Green Silver on the roof of the building. The RACC website says there's more stuff to see inside, which I didn't know at the time, so that's left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.

One thing you won't see here is Ancestor Tree, a ginormous thingamabob made from the roots of a tree that was torn out for the New Columbia project. It was dedicated in 2005, and spent the next few years weirding people out while also beginning to rot subtly. By 2012 it was already so far gone that they decided to just tear it out on safety grounds. There was talk of replacing it for a while, but it's been over a decade now that hasn't happened yet, probably for budgetary reasons. Which is ironic given that tree roots technically do grow on trees. But hey, what do I know...

Unseen Worlds

Next up we're back in industrial North Portland for another installment in the ongoing public art series. This time^[1] we're taking a look at Unseen Worlds (2002) by artist Fernanda d'Agostino (whose work has appeared here a lot). This comes to us via Portland's Bureau of Environmental Services, specifically their Columbia Blvd. Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is one reason the mainstream guides for tourists don't tell you this is a must-see. (C'mon, stop snickering for a minute and let's pretend we're all serious people having a serious chat about capital-A Art for a minute.) Here's the official RACC description, which is repeated across several pages covering different sub-categories of the art here:

The artworks along this path depict various aspects of the wetlands and reparian environments of the site. You’ll find images of microorganisms and macro invertebrates used to test water quality. The paving inlays hint at the tidal nature of the slough. The “Dendritic Bridge” frames a view of the intersection of industrial and natural landscapes and you’ll find a bird list for the site beneath your feet. Birdhouses provide bird habitat and the perches reference feathers, beaks and some of the tools used in the sewer treatment plant. Looking through the three holes in the “Periscope Stone” you’ll see the favorite perch for Bald Eagles that frequent the park in early spring, the composter at the treatment plant, and the biggest snag (favorite all round habitat) on the site.

So why is this here? The art's located along a side branch of the Columbia Slough Trail skirts around the east side of the plant. On the south end, it almost[2] connects you to the Peninsula Crossing Trail, Evidently either the trail, or the Inverness bridge, or the Big Pipe, or some other capital project here generated enough Percent for Art money to fund some art and, I guess, give trail users something less sewer-y to look at and think about on their way through the area. Which I guess is nice if you're a squeamish grownup with delicate sensibilities, which covers just about everyone here. I mean, the agency's name -- "Bureau of Environmental Services" -- is a euphemism, and they would apparently be thrilled if the public saw them as the agency that's somehow in charge of herons and salmon and rain, and their engineers spend their days working on the city's mystical bond with same. Or something along those lines anyway.

But that's just one way to approach the problem. Next time BES has a major capital project here -- and there's bound to be another one sooner or later -- I hereby propose we put the city's eight year olds in charge of the whole public art program. I mean, grade school kids generally, but especially the eight year olds. And instead of no-fun grownups guiding them toward another batch of the same old tasteful nature art that everyone's supposed to like -- instead of doing that we really lean into whatever the eight year olds come up with, just this once. Obviously in general this is no way to run a city, and calling them "subject matter experts" is kind of a stretch, but they at least spend a lot of time giggling about the topic.

Also it's not like this would be unprecedented in the wider art world, although most of the examples that come back in a quick interweb search seem to be unintentional.

• The, ah, tightly coiled new W Hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland. I mean, it's Scotland -- even if people thought it looked like a local walnut-chocolate snack, or a "haute couture blindfold", rather than a big pile of poo, they wouldn't admit to it.
• Meanwhile in Philadelphia (possibly America's answer to Scotland), the local art museum acquired one of those giant Claes Oldenburg sculptures in 2011. Paint Torch is a 51' high tilted paintbrush, with a nearby blob of red paint, celebrating the art of painting. And that's all it was until one day in 2015 when artist Kid Hazo happened along and attached a grinning mouth and two big googly eyes to the paint blob, which was instantly and utterly transformed. In an age of omni-surveillance and zero tolerance everything, this is the only kind of art intervention that works: It can be undone in seconds, but can't be unseen no matter how much time elapses.
• Meanwhile in Boston, in 2023 the city welcomed The Embrace, the city's weird but official new MLK memorial. Said to be inspired by a photo of MLK hugging Corretta Scott King shortly after being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the $10M giant-sized art tries and fails to show just the hug in a sorta-minimalist way by depicting a tangled nightmare of disembodied arms and general biology, inspiring scatological thoughts over on Reddit.
• San Jose, California's 1994 statue of the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl depicts him coiled like a rattlesnake, and seen from a certain distance bystanders tend to just see the coiled shape and draw conclusions. General consensus seems to be that even if it was a poo emoji statue, it's still an upgrade over the statue it replaced, a pioneer so odious he was canceled way back in 1988.
• In Chicago, an artist made a fountain depicting a semi-realistic pile of the stuff, even labeling it "SHIT FOUNTAIN" to remove any lingering doubt. Seems he created it to criticize his neighbors for not cleaning up after their dogs.
• Meanwhile in Rotterdam, back in 2018, a local art museum hosted a Vienna-based art collective and their giant photorealistic logs of poo. They may have realized, late in the process, that this might not be quite enough to get a rise out of jaded Dutch museum-goers, and added another conceptual bit to the mix:
  

  Now, the sculptures rest on Persian rugs and are stared at by visitors wearing naked suits featuring various shapes and sizes of male and female sexual parts.
  
  For Gantner, the naked suits are “a gift to visitors” that enhance the exhibition and their own experience of it.
  
  “You step into the costume and you immediately transform into another being. People don’t know anymore what your job is, if you’re rich, poor, male or female, so you forget a little bit about all these rules.”

• Which brings us to Orlando, Florida, where we meet the most crass one of all, a giant walk-in inflatable poo emoji that was in town temporarily to promote some sort of deodorizer spray.

Since I'm way too old to submit ideas to the contest I just suggested, and I'm also not an official artist and ineligible if they did a boring regular art proposal process, let me just tell you my idea. You know how grand entrances to important buildings are often flanked by art of guardian animals, right? Things like sculptures of lions sitting outside library entrances. Imagine a pair of giant stainless steel poo emojis, grinning as they flank the main entrance to the plant. Coiling in opposite directions to maintain classical symmetry, and bidding the visitor welcome to where the magic happens.

---

Footnotes

[1]. About this post

You might have noticed that the photos in this post are a bit subpar and few in number. If you look closer you might notice they were taken wayyy back in 2014. This is another one of those posts that lingered around in drafts for ages because I couldn't figure out what it was called, and without a name I don't even have a title for the post, and the rest of the research gets pretty difficult, too, and I'd basically given up on this one but never got around to deleting it. Then a few days ago I was poking around on the revamped RACC website again and noticed entries for the art next to the sewer plant, and I will swear up and down and three times sideways that these database entries didn't exist until quite recently. So this time I couldn't move forward because the website that's supposed to be the single source of truth about these things just sort of neglected to mention the art here, for unknown reasons.

Dans la Nuit (Lovers)

Semi-fresh on the heels of Floating Figure (last month's rather stale public art post), here are a few photos of Dans la Nuit (Lovers), also by French-American sculptor Gaston Lachaise. It used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, on the right side of the main entrance, across from Floating Figure, having replaced Auguste Maillol's La Montagne around 2014 in conjunction with a temporary Lachaise exhibit. The two sculptures quietly went off exhibit or maybe left town sometime in 2020-21 while everyone was focused on the pandemic, and protesters were busy toppling statues of various dead presidents right next door in the South Park Blocks.

This post and its companion are another reminder that this humble blog does not aspire to be anyone's hub for breaking news: I took most of these photos back around 2014, shortly after the big Maillol-Lachaise swap-out, before the little nameplates were installed. Obviously I couldn't hit the big orange Publish button at that point, since I didn't actually know anything about the newly arrived art, so I saved a couple of draft posts with placeholder titles and moved on. A year or so later I was in the area and noticed the nameplates and duly took photos of them, but by then I'd moved on to other projects and just left it at that: I knew the photos were saved somewhere in either iPhoto or Flickr and I could probably find them again if I was in the mood to finish these posts, and I could always go back and take new photos if I genuinely couldn't find the older ones. Meanwhile fresh sedimentary layers of draft posts kept accumulating on top of this leftover art stuff from 2014, and eventually the art (and the nameplates) weren't there anymore, and Google was (as usual) pretty useless without already knowing the titles, or at minimum the artist. Then a few months ago I stumbled across the 'lost' nameplate photos during a brief, yet tedious, photo-organizing bender and remembered I'd been looking for them. So I added those photos to the appropriate photosets, updated everything with the actual names, did the usual internet research, even got some words in place... and then saved the posts as updated drafts, to languish for a few more months. Because, as it generally is with these things, taking the photos and researching and writing is ninety percent of the work, while editing is the second ninety percent of the work.

Floating Figure

Next up we've got a few photos of Floating Figure, a sculpture by French-American artist Gaston Lachaise that used to be outside the Portland Art Museum, to the left of the main entrance. (Another Lachaise, Dans le Nuit (Lovers), sat on the right side of the entrance.) It replaced Auguste Maillol's La Riviere sometime around 2013-2014, and went off exhibit sometime during the recent pandemic; Floating Figure is clearly visible on Google Street View imagery dated June 2019, and absent in Microsoft's Bing Streetside View dated September 2021, so that gives us a rough time window for when they were removed.

What I don't know is whether the removal was pre-planned, or happened because of the recent bout of civic iconoclasm that resulted in toppling the dead president statues along the Park Blocks and elsewhere around town, as well as Harvey Scott on Mt. Tabor, the gun-n-bible-totin' pioneers in Chapman Square, and even the Thompson Elk that used to be in the middle of SW Main St. So maybe the museum figured they'd be targeted eventually, once the supply of slaveholding aristocrats and other canceled white guys ran out. Which, I dunno, I don't recall that anyone was toppling statues over cis- and hetero-normativity or excessive Pepe-le-Peu Frenchness at the time, but who knows.

Community Garden Fence, McCoy Park

Ok, next up on our temporarily(?)-revived public art thing, here are some photos of the Community Garden Fence at McCoy Park, created by artist Suzanne Lee. The brief RACC description:

The New Community Garden Fence panels mark each of the four entries to the garden and represent different areas of the world. The images of food and plants along with their quotations offer visual and cultural references which reflect both the similarities and differences between cultures.

As you might've guessed, this is another post that sat around as a forgotten draft since 2014, shortly after I took the photos here. So the standard disclaimer applies: Old photos mean it may or may not look like this now, your mileage may vary, no refunds. The last photo in the set is from a distance to show more of the fence in context, which is the only photo I took of the garden itself. Which is a little odd since I had an occasional "take photos of community gardens" project going at the time, but I always tend to do this, going full tunnel vision on one particular topic for a while and not noticing the mural I walked past on my way to look at an obscure bridge, and a month later not noticing an obscure bridge on my way to an especially interesting waterfall, or not attending to the growing stack of real life to-do items that pile up while chasing this stuff. I do really enjoy chasing rabbit holes all the way down, but I can't pretend there isn't a downside to being like this.

This was originally supposed to be the third of four public art posts set in or near the same park; the fourth would have been about Ancestor Tree, a very large conceptual art thing that was meant to be a centerpiece of the park. It was a chunk of a huge London plane tree that had been cut down during the New Columbia rebuild, trimmed and flipped upside down so it looked like a tree stump balancing on the tips of its roots. I was not a big fan of it based on photos I'd seen, and snarking about it might have been fun. But apparently the ex-tree was no match for the elements in its new form, and it began to rot not long after installation. So the city removed it in 2012, before I got around to stopping by for photos. The article talks about maybe finding some sort of replacement art to take its place, but I gather this never happened and the site remains an open grassy field instead, which is a perfectly fine thing to have in a city park.

The article doesn't say what happened to the semi-rotten art afterward. They probably just woodchipped it, but sometimes it's easier, from a bureaucratic standpoint, to just ship things off to an obscure warehouse to be forgotten in long-term storage, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So who knows. It would be weird and unsettling to run across it lurking in a shadowy corner of a vast, dimly lit warehouse, but I guess that's still better than being stuck with a warehouse full of unwanted Confederate statues like a lot of cities in this country. So there's that, I guess.

Moons and Stars, McCoy Park

Next up, here are a few photos of Moons & Stars, another public art piece at McCoy Park, taken on the same visit as the previous post (as in, these photos are from 2014, and things might have changed since then). This one was created by by Hong Kong-born Portland artist Horatio Hung-Yan Law, and its RACC page includes a brief description:

The moon’s phases are represented by the granite disks found embedded in the pavement. Various cultural ideas about the cycle of life are captured in the quotations, proverbs, folk sayings and myths you’ll find etched in the disks.

Squirrel/Salmon Benches, McCoy Park

November seems to be a designated month for people to do ambitious projects: Writing a novel in 30 days; growing a luxurious handlebar mustache in 30 days to raise prostate awareness, and other worthy causes. I'm not feeling anywhere near that ambitious, but it occurred to me that my infamous drafts folder is a mix of recent hiking & outdoor posts that lately seem to take forever to finish, and a smaller set of public art and city park posts from a few years ago that I never quite finished for various reasons and kind of forgot about. So I thought I might switch gears and start at the back of the drafts folder and see how many of those I can finish this month. Unless I get chosen for jury duty later this month, in which case all bets are off.

So the first thing we're looking at this month is "Squirrel/Salmon Benches", a couple of cute circa-2005 park benches in North Portland's McCoy Park. The second link, which goes to the freshly-redesigned-again RACC public art database -- has this to say about it:

The squirrel & salmon benches were designed to reflect Northwest wildlife. Mufu Ahmed is a Nigerian poet, sculptor and textile artist who combines the imagery, traditions and stories of his Yoruba culture with the techniques, materials and applications of the Western world.

I really like the squirrel design, and the salmon one is fine as far as salmon art goes, although it's a heavily overused theme in this part of the world. At one point I started tagging posts about salmon art with "Heroic Salmon", as the fish are usually depicted bravely struggling back to their streams of origin to spawn and promptly drop dead. An inspiring life story from which the public is meant to draw important life lessons, I guess. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that. Anyway, the really striking thing about the benches, and a big clue that they're from 2005 and not 2021, is what's not there: No metal bar down the middle to keep people from sleeping there, no spiky bits to make it unpleasant to sit on, no electrified razor wire or whatever the latest anti-homeless technology is. They're just plain old park benches, which are rapidly becoming about as common as pay phones. The big asterisk here is that these are not recent photos, and for all I know the city could have built a piranha-filled moat around the benches by now. Your mileage may vary widely, in other words.

Oddly enough, one of the other recipients of the aforementioned "Heroic Salmon" tag (and subject of a 2012 post here) is a fountain inside a parking garage at the Lloyd Center mall. And in a weird coincidence, the entire mall is being repossessed as of this week, and the would-be repossessor says they plan to demolish the mall and put in offices and housing instead, and the Lloyd District will eventually look just like every other gentrified part of town, with identical buildings sporting the same hip local chain stores and restaurants. I mean, I realize the shopping mall era is over, and this particular mall's been declining for years now, and a vast shopping mall just across the river from downtown was always a an awkward fit, and an open-air mall was never a good idea in this climate. And even after its 1990s revival slash heyday it was never actually 'cool', because it was still a shopping mall. And a mall with awful timing, too; in the 90s renovation the owners managed to rip out or conceal all of the mall's original Midcentury character, just before that look became cool again, and now the mall's goofy 1990 postmodern stuff is about to meet the same fate, probably just before that look becomes cool again. All of that said, I do have fond memories about the place during that particular time period, though, I will actually be sad to see it go. It's hard to explain.

The park here is actually the result of another demolish-replace-and-gentrify effort, this one from a late 90s/early 2000s effort to replace the city's most notorious public housing project with a twee suburb. But we'll get into that when I finish the post about the park itself. Which might happen this month? Or if not this month, soon at least. Ideally.

Millikan Way MAX art

Ok, so this next public art post is about the Millikan Way MAX station, which has sort of a STEM theme due to the old Beaverton Tektronix campus next door. I took a couple of photos when I was there a few years ago, figuring I could grab a quotable blurb about it from one of the usual places, and poof, there's your blog post. And then the search came up empty, and this post sank to the bottom of the Drafts folder and didn't get a second glance for ages.

TriMet's art guide for the westside Blue Line merely says the station as a whole was designed by the "Westside design team", and describes a few of the features, without listing titles or artists for most of them:

Trees, wetlands and the nearby Tektronix campus inspired the Westside design team artists’ theme of nature bumping up against high technology.

• Brick patterns on the systems buildings suggest coniferous and deciduous trees
• The songs of local birds are etched in bronze plaques along the trackway
• Clusters of leaves, seeds and pine cones are sandblasted in 30 locations in the plaza
• Test patterns and mathematical symbols on graph paper are created in terrazzo
• Christopher Rauschenberg’s "Time Window<" documents the view from the shelter in 1994

This whole thing seemed unusually vague; I finally understood why after I found a 1998 Oregonian article reviewing the art for the Blue Line's grand opening, back when that was something newspapers did. Millikan Way just gets a brief mention in the article, grouped with a few others: "Beaverton Transit Center, Beaverton Central, Millikan Way and Beaverton Creek: These four stations embrace nearly all the cliches of 90s public art, from photographs etched on the shelters, to cosmic allusions and navigation devices integrated into the paving patterns."

The article explains that MAX stations east of 185th don't have freestanding art because the feds prohibited federally funded projects from buying art during the initial phase of the project, until the rules changed in 1995. It doesn't explain when the earlier rules were put in place, but I suspect that came out of the Mapplethorpe/Serrano culture wars of the late 80s and early 90s. The pre-1995 rules had a small loophole in that they didn't prohibit you from hiring artists for your design team, and then having them do decorative pavers, designs on brick buildings, themed benches, etc. and classify it all as design rather than capital-A art. So that's basically what TriMet did, and I suppose this is why we aren't told exactly who designed what.

In discussing "cliches of 90s public art", the Oregonian piece mentions "The Kudzu Effect (or: The Rise of a New Academy)", a brief and snarky 1996 article by Joyce Kozloff. It lists ten contemporary public art cliches, which seem as contemporary now as they were in 1996; her names for them give a bit of the flavor of the article:

1. It’s a Small World
2. Junior High School Science Project
3. Junior High School Geography Project
4. The Artist/Architect Collaboration (also known as the The Two’fer)
5. Kids “R” Us
6. Heal the Earth Project
7. The Artist/Writer Collaboration
8. The New Age Observatory (also known as Son et Lumière)
9. Transgressions and Interventions
10. Triumphal Arch to Nowhere and Domestic Obelisk

Kozloff explains this style as a reaction to the arts community being besieged by angry fundies. I suppose the idea was that upbeat and inoffensive art might placate the Moral Majority goons, or at least they'd go yell at somebody else for a change. Which worked, in a away, in that you rarely see them hollering about art anymore. Although now they won't shut up about Trump's divine infallibility and all the races, religions, and other groups they want to wipe off the face of the earth. I am unsure that this is a real improvement.

Anchor Monument, Kelley Point

When a blog post lies around in Drafts for ages, it isn't always because I'm too busy, or I'm procrastinating, or just lazy, or what have you. Sometimes it's because, try as I might, I'm unable to find any useful information about the subject of the post. Several years ago I did a post about North Portland's Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette River flows into the Columbia. At the far tip of the point you'll find the anchor shown above; it's either an old but real anchor or a sculpture of an anchor, and I don't know which because there wasn't a sign or a label or any indication of who made it or who put it there, much less why. The usual practice here is that public art gets its own blog post, apart from the one about the park it's in, so I duly created a draft post for the anchor. But all these years later I still don't know anything about it, and it's not for lack of searching.

My one and only hypothesis goes something like this: The park was originally created in 1973 by the Port of Portland, after dumping a bunch of soil there from a dredging project. I bet the anchor dates to around that time, before the city took it over in 1984. I bet they just sort of thought the tip of the point deserved something decorative, and an anchor was the obvious choice for a park owned by the local port district. Maybe they just made the anchor in house & didn't really think of it as fancy public art, which would explain why it's not in any of the usual inventory databases. They may not have even kept records about it. That's just a hypothesis, mind you. If I ever find out what the deal is, I'll update the post, though I wouldn't hold my breath waiting around for that if I were you. And as always, feel free to leave a note here if you know anything more about it.

Richmond School mosaics

Next up, we're visiting the animal & nature mosaics outside Richmond Elementary in SE Portland, at 41st & Grant Ct. These were created in 2008-09 by artist Lynn Takata, along with students from the school's Japanese language immersion program.

This All Happened More or Less

One of the newer public artworks in Portland (at the time of writing) is This All Happened More Or Less, a collection of tiny figures scattered along inner SE Division St. These were created in 2014 by artists Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis for a city streetscape project that also added bioswales and other gentrifying goodies. The RACC press release described the project thusly:

Appropriately titled “This All Happened More or Less,” the bronze characters created by the artists were inspired by their observations of activity along Division. The scale of these bronze figures (much different than the scale usually seen in public art) can draw a viewer in close enough to imagine a story behind each of the figures that vary from active, such as a kid on a skateboard, to inactive, such as waiting for a bus or sitting quietly with a pet dog. The artists have said, “We are merely suggesting stories and we want people to draw their own conclusions, to fill in all of the details, and to follow their imaginations.”

The title is almost, not quite, the opening line of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Which I admit I haven't read since high school, so the allusion sort of escapes me at the moment.

Colonial Soldier, SW Barbur & Huber

Next stop on our public art tour takes us a bit off the beaten path. If you're heading out of Portland on SW Barbur, right after the tangled intersection with Capitol Highway and I-5 you might catch a quick glimpse of a statue of a Colonial minuteman, bravely guarding the low-rise brick offices of a local mortgage company. I noticed this a couple of times on rare trips out to the 'burbs and made a note to check it out, which I did on a subsequent rare trip. (It's at SW Barbur & Huber St.; the geotag for this post points at the exact location.) The statue's base includes an inscription "Carlton Bell 1976", along with the names of a few assistants, which I can't quite make out in my photos, unfortunately.

The only info I've found about this statue comes from an almost decade-old Portland Public Art post. Or rather, from the comments to the post. Several comments are by people who had known Bell in years past and had googled around trying to figure out what ever became of him. Go read the whole thread. It's kind of fascinating. And be sure to look at the dates: The post is from April 2006, but comments keep trickling in; the most recent one (as of right now) is dated July 2015.

I wish internet comment sections worked like that more often. I still get occasional (and generally interesting) comments to my original Kelly Butte post (which also dates to 2006), but that's pretty much the only example I've got here. Alhough to be honest this humble blog often goes months without a single comment, even to the most recent posts. I prefer to think that's because I've done such a thorough job that nobody has anything more to add. That may even be true sometimes...