Impressed Concrete

Way back in 2013 when the MAX Orange Line was under construction, TriMet used some of their mandatory public art money on a temporary installation, printing artsy phrases on some of their construction fencing. I was still trying to be semi-timely about getting posts finished, at least for temporary things like this, and I managed to put together a blog post about Orange Lining: Art Starts Now while some of the fences were still up. Toward the end of that post I mentioned that the project had an upcoming Phase 2 in the works called Impressed Concrete and I was going to hold off posting about it for a while to accumulate more photos. So now you're looking at the promised phase 2 post, over a decade later, and I even accumulated a few more photos over that time.

One fact of life of construction projects west of the Cascades is that if your project will take longer than the month of August or so, your jobsite will be rained on, possibly a lot. So you'll have mud to deal with, as well as runoff water that has to go somewhere, and that water can get you in a lot of trouble if you don't manage it correctly. If there's too much silt in your runoff and it ends up in local streams, it makes the fish sad and angsty and then the EPA fines you for violating the federal Clean Water Act. One very common way to address this is to install silt fencing, which is a sort of synthetic fabric barrier that is supposed to let water through while blocking any soil particles trying to go along for the ride. This supposedly works fairly well, at least when the fencing is installed properly and then maintained regularly (which does not always happen), and most importantly it's potentially cheaper than paying EPA fines. So when the time came to build the TriMet MAX Orange Line down to Milwaukie, the agency was set to buy a large quantity of the stuff.

Separately, the agency had (and has) a longstanding legal requirement to spend some low single-digit percentage of the total project costs on public art projects. This typically means each MAX station gets some sort of whimsical sculpture that amuses kids and perplexes adults. Beyond that, someone put two and two together and realized the miles of orange fabric were a potential blank canvas and figured out how to silkscreen black letters onto the orange background. The public was invited to submit poetic phrases, old sayings, and general aphorisms and whatnot (to a maximum 50 characters) for potential use somewhere along the long orange fence. Which is a lot of trouble to go to just to decorate a temporary fence. Fortunately(?), MAX contractors were also going to need to tear up and rebuild a lot of sidewalks over the course of the project, and pressing letters into freshly poured concrete is cheap and easy, and the practice dates back to at least the ancient Romans. So the effort got a Phase 2, largely reusing the text chosen for the orange silt fences, but reappearing this time as words in the sidewalk.

At one point the project had its own website at OrangeLining.net, and a separate project blog, because that was just how you did social media back then. Those went away ages ago (and the links go to Wayback Machine copies), but Trimet's Orange Line art guide is still online (as of December 2024), and it has this to say about the art:

Buster Simpson and Peg Butler, Orange Lining: Art Starts Now and Impressed Concrete.
Orange polypropylene fencing, concrete

• Public call for writing resulted in selection of 102 poetic phrases.
• Phrases were printed on orange silt fencing and installed temporarily during light rail construction.
• Phrases are stamped into new concrete sidewalks at 122 locations along the alignment.

Before anyone asks: No, I don't have photos of all 122 locations, and no, I'm not taking that on as a new project. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the old OrangeLining.net page with all the inscriptions has been archived for posterity, in case anyone's curious, and tracking them all down in real life is left as an exercise for the reader.

Cradle

The next installment of my ongoing let's-go-look-at-public-art project takes us back to Portland's South Waterfront district again. It's not a part of town I tend to go and wander around in just for fun, so I'm not all that surprised that more art went in while I wasn't paying attention. Beyond that, I'm reasonbly sure I've walked along this stretch of the South Waterfront Greenway before without really noticing any of the new art a few times, because that wasn't what I was looking for at the time. So with that introduction out of the way, up first in this sorta-belated art tour is Cradle (2013) by Northwest artist Buster Simpson, located toward the current north end of the greenway at the foot of Curry Street. It's a sort of concrete frame holding some weathered logs and tree roots, like ones you'd see as driftwood on the beach, or as part of a slash pile after a clear cut, or as local construction debris after building another South Waterfront condo tower, or maybe it's a random dead tree or two that came floating down the Willamette from who-knows-where after a big storm. At first glance you might think it's not very nice to look at, which honestly was my first impression too. But I think I understand what's going on here well enough to try to explain it. Let's start with the Public Art Archive page for Cradle (linked up above), which offers this description:

“Cradle” is a sculptural gift to the Willamette River. Once a wild river with vast amounts of woody debris, the Willamette has been tamed and we have become its steward. Four anthropomorphic concrete anchors cradle three cedar root wads as if awaiting eventual deployment of their woody debris in support of habitat enhancement along the river’s edge. “Cradle” offers a dynamic encounter between the weight of the human-like anchors and the buoyancy of the tree biomass. The embrace relays an authenticity of relationship and interdependence, from the cradle on to future generations. Four words in Chinuk Wawa, provided by The Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde, are inscribed on the concrete anchors and invite passersby to contemplate the site’s history and fathom our complex relationship with it as we look into the future.

If you aren't immersed in Pacific Northwest environmental policy stuff, you'll probably come away from that wondering why everyone is so worked up about woody debris. All of that talk is really about endangered salmon. The idea here is that, if left undisturbed, rivers and streams naturally tend to accumulate old fallen logs, dead tree stumps, etc. from the surrounding forest, and this debris serves as an essential safe space for baby salmon, providing shelter from hungry predators and summer heat. The wood is also supposed to slow down the water flowing around it, which should allow gravel to accumulate on the creekbed nearby instead of being washed further downstream, and these gravel beds are essential as the one and only place a returning salmon is interested in laying or fertilizing eggs. After which they can relax and chill and live happily ever after. (*checks notes*) Er, actually they drop dead almost immediately and decay on the spot with all the other salmon, and it smells terrible, but if you freeze and roll the credits just before that happens it's actually the same plot as every Hallmark holiday movie: Protagonist returns to the same wholesome hometown they once outgrew; relationship drama ensues; ends up spawning; abandons entire career and never goes back to the big city. Anyway, the point is that the wood promotes both ends of the whole circle of life, if that makes any sense. Furthermore, as the theory goes, we don't have to just sit around and wait for these conditions to occur naturally on their own; instead, we can create ideal salmon habitat wherever we want, by bringing in logs from somewhere else and anchoring them in place with weights and steel cables and whatnot so they don't just float away. Which is essentially what the art here is depicting, in stylized form.

So yeah, aesthetics aside it would be fantastic if we could point to Cradle as a monument to How We Fixed The Salmon Problem. Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. As an August 2022 article (summarizing a May 2022 study) explains, some habitat restoration methods clearly are beneficial, like removing barriers to migrating fish, everything from fixing culverts under streets to removing entire dams. (And check out this Oregon Fish & Wildlife map showing roughly how many unmitigated salmon barriers are still out there.) Letting beavers build dams (which creates wetlands) seems to help a lot too. And they identified some individual cases where adding woody debris seemed to have helped, but in many cases it had no effect on juvenile salmon numbers. The tone of the report suggests they aren't ready to give up on the idea just yet, as it sure seems like it ought to work. But there's clearly a missing puzzle piece around what gives a logjam the right salmon feng shui, and so far nobody knows what that puzzle piece is. And then there's a much larger problem: While improved habitat does seem to boost salmon numbers right up to the point where they depart and head out to sea, so far there hasn't been a corresponding bump in the numbers of adult fish returning to their point of origin. And again, nobody knows why. So that's a bit of a problem, and it's possible that making art to celebrate woody debris was a bit premature, in retrospect.

As a bit of historical context, there are plenty of swanky midcentury architectural fish ladders^[1] out there too, dating back to the days when those were the thing that was going to fix the Salmon Problem.^[2]. So at least this isn't a new trend, I guess. And I'm glad these examples exist, because if they didn't I was going to have to use an analogy with fancy porcelain phrenology heads instead, and phrenology heads are creepy.

So yeah, Cradle is maybe not a crowd pleaser in the looks department, and the whole concept behind it turns out to come with a big asterisk, and it can't even fall back on being a whimsical kinetic whatzit for kids and tourists like a lot of the art the city buys. But at least I can think of a few interesting comparisons we can do between it and other art around town, which means I get to link to a few old blog posts. This is something you're supposed to do if you're writing a Serious Article about capital-A Art, to illustrate some theory you have or just to demonstrate you've looked at other Art before and have had serious thoughts about it too. Though I've never figured out whether linking to your own old posts hurts or helps when Google decides how to rank this stuff.

First, if you want to celebrate something that actually helps salmon, there are at least two statues of beavers around town, probably more than that. One is up on NE Alberta St., and one further south on the Greenway Trail at the Heron Pointe condos. The latter has been there since the 1980s and seems to be a beloved part of the neighborhood as people are always giving it fresh flowers to hold, or making costumes for it. Cradle does not seem to have inspired the same level of devotion, or at least it hasn't yet. About which, it's an established scientific fact that human beings seem to be inherently biased in favor of "charismatic megafauna" versus, say, tree roots.

There actually is a way to make woody debris more charismatic, though, and I'm going to tell you how, though I can't promise this will be enough to save the baby salmon or the world in general. When I was a small child in the late 70s, my mom had this business idea that 1.) putting googly eyes on driftwood was a legitimate Pacific Northwest handicraft, and 2.) people will pay good money for driftwood critters with googly eyes. See, the art is in picking out the wood that has inherent potential, and then putting the googly eyes right where they have to be. Stop there and change nothing else, and viewers' brains will do the rest of the work and turn that into a cute face. (Compare the story about the pope asking Michelangelo how he created his David statue. Michelangelo replied that it was simple: You just take your chisel and chip away everything that isn't David.) After a couple of family trips to the beach, a few things became clear. First, it turns out most driftwood has little or no inherent potential for cuteness, and kids are no help at all in picking out the few choice bits of wood that do. So that part is a lot time consuming than you might think. Second, you would have to find and sell a great deal of googly-eyed driftwood critters just to break even on trips to the coast, given the high gas prices and low mileage of the late 70s. And third, taking driftwood from the beach for commercial purposes was and is a bit of a legal grey area at best. So that's why mom's business idea didn't pencil out back then, and all of this is a very roundabout way of saying the Cradle tree roots would almost certainly benefit from having googly eyes. But please note that it's only Art if an actual artist with an MFA comes by and adds them. If anyone else does it's just vandalism and Legal says I have to tell you not to do that. Even you, mom, if you're reading this.

A second comparison is with Ancestor Tree in North Portland's McCoy Park, which I talked about a bit here. It was another giant tree root, pulled up and positioned above ground and displayed as art. And I say "was" because the wood wasn't preserved very well, and the art only lasted around 7 years before decay made the giant root a safety hazard and it had to be torn out. I don't know if Cradle is at the same risk of decay over time, but at least it doesn't have to support its own weight while towering over the park's soft, puny visitors, so there's that at least.

Our third comparison is with Simpson's 1991 Host Analog outside the Oregon Convention Center. Host Analog went in around the peak of the state's spotted owl wars, and it looks superficially similar to Cradle: A fallen old growth tree transported to the big city, with a support structure holding it in place, and in this case an irrigation system to try to simulate moist old growth forest conditions in an urban environment full of conventiongoers. But the concept behind it is different: The fallen tree is set up to be a nurse log for future tree(s), and the art is the very slow process of decay and regrowth over many decades as they roll by, and -- believe it or not -- it has nothing to do with migrating salmon at all. But that was then; it's the 21st Century now, and the Owl Problem fell out of the headlines years ago thanks to a muddle of federal consent degrees and a few studies saying the owls are doomed no matter what we do because of invasive rival owls. So, long story short, nobody wants owl art anymore. Instead, contemporary public art buyers simply cannot get enough awareness-raising salmon art, regardless of how much of it they already have, and I'm trying to avoid heavyhanded historical analogies with stuff like Confederate memorials, or statues of Lenin, or idealized Bible-thumpin' pioneers, or of assorted local royalty, since that's really, really not where I wanted to go with this.

Although now that you mention it, if you look at a male sockeye salmon in its migration/spawning body form, and compare that with one of the more desperately inbred Habsburgs, say, Charles II of Spain, you have to admit the resemblance is uncanny: The nose, the jawline, the hump, the difficulty in reproducing, everything. They could almost be cousin-uncle-siblings. So I dunno, man. I dunno.

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Footnotes

1. That last fish ladder link ("ladders") goes to an Art Deco fish ladder from the 1930s located in... Oklahoma, on a creek that eventually flows into the Gulf of Mexico via the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers. None of which are home to naturally-occurring salmon, nor has the creek ever been stocked with them, and this all happened close to half a century before the word "performative" came into use for this sort of thing. On the other hand it looks kind of cool, and building it created some good honest construction jobs for a while, and the engineers involved apparently meant well by it, so there's that. And semi-relatedly, the one link in this paragraph ("Atchafalaya") goes to a 1987 John McPhee essay about the Mississippi River and engineers' ongoing attempts to control it, which are almost certainly doomed in the long run. It doesn't have much to do with the art here, honestly, or salmon for that matter, but the writing is much better than anything you're likely to encounter here on this humble blog. So go read that instead if you're sick of me babbling on about about art and waterfalls and so forth.

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2. Speaking of stream restoration, I took a look at the Utilities corner of PortlandMaps -- which lets you explore the many pipes and wires that lurk beneath city streets -- and from what I can tell the closest natural stream to here is a creek that starts up in the West Hills and comes down from the West Hills south of the VA Hospital. The city sewer/stormwater map starts tracking it here where it flows under the VA hospital service road in a culvert. The creek flows naturally on the surface for a couple of hundred feet, then enters a pipe just uphill of Terwilliger and remains underground after that, trending vaguely northeast in pipes that don't align with the street grid -- which usually means it's an old pipe that followed the original course of the creek. In fact the pipe segment that the last link goes to is dated 1892 and was built with bricks. That diagonal pattern ends at the redeveloped South Waterfront district, where a lot of basic infrastructure was rebuilt in the early 2000s before the condo towers came, so it's hard to tell exactly where the creek used to enter the Willamette River, but it was either right at Curry St., or a block north at Whitaker St., or a bit further than that, somewhere in the Zidell shipyard area. But that doesn't happen anymore; instead it flows into the city's Big Pipe system, as a blend of the original creek plus storm runoff and local sewage, and flows north along Waterfront Park, then into a tunnel under the river, then it gets pumped uphill to cross the North Portland peninsula to the Columbia Wastewater Plant, and after treatment ends up in the Columbia Slough. All of this is to say that if the city (and/or developers) had been serious about doing some actual stream restoration work around here, they missed a golden opportunity to daylight an urban waterway back in the early 2000s. But I haven't seen any indication the city even considered it at the time, and are content to just do symbolic measures instead.

Portland Music Mural

Here are a few photos of the new-ish Portland Music Mural, next to the MAX turnaround on 11th in downtown Portland (and near the RBG mural we looked at recently). Painted by the Pander Brothers, and featuring prominent local musicians past and present, and backed by various movers and shakers in local music, the mural got quite a media blitz when it was created in 2023. Here's an Oregonlive story, one at Willamette Week and one at the Portland Tribune, a KATU story, and probably others I missed in a quick search. Which, ok, that may not seem like much of a media blitz, but it's more than new murals usually get around here.

The worst thing about it has nothing to do with the mural itself. It got a generally positive reception here, so its backers concluded the next logical step would be to rapidly take the concept nationwide, to finally celebrate local music in places like Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, Seattle (ugh), and even Boise, where the local music scene is just cave people hitting rocks with sticks and grunting on the 1 and 3. I dunno, it just reminds me too much of what happens whenever a beloved local business sells out to private equity: First there's an aggressive nationwide expansion, and then the whole thing craters a couple of years later, and after that -- instead of losing their shirts over this -- the private equity dudes just use the loss to cancel out profits elsewhere and end up owing precisely zero dollars and zero cents in taxes again, year after year. I'm not suggesting there are big piles of cash changing hands behind the scenes here; just that taking things nationwide ASAP usually doesn't work out as planned, and it makes me sad to see dumb ideas from Wall Street popping up in the arts.

The best thing about the mural is that the website includes a key to who's on the mural, which you should probably commit to memory in case someone challenges you to Portland's traditional bloodsport, a "You Probably Haven't Heard Of Them" duel. Be aware that merely identifying semi-obscure musicians is not enough to win the duel most of the time, so come prepared with bonus facts and opinions: Be ready to name all of their albums, ordered correctly best-to-worst, and identify which of these albums you own on vinyl. Then explain when and how that artist sold out to The Man (because everyone does eventually) and discuss why their early work up until that point was better. Score even more points for each artist on the mural who is totally overrated and doesn't belong there, and for ranting about exactly who should be up there instead, double points if your opponent hasn't heard of them. Whoever loses the duel has to skip town on the next Greyhound to Boise, while the winner gets to stay, for now. But the price of victory is eternal vigilance; new bands you probably haven't heard of are constantly forming in garages all over town, even while you're asleep, and some might escape detection for a while by not putting out a vinyl EP right away. And inevitably, one of these days, a younger, hipper challenger will say a name that doesn't ring a bell, and it'll turn out to be a 15 year old beatboxer from Hillsboro who also raps in Tamil and has over 10 million TikTok followers, and she's never even touched a music CD or a vinyl record, and has no idea why somebody would want to make one in 2024. Therefore, send not to know for whom the Boise bus rolls; it rolls for thee.

Flying Together (MHCC)

Next up we're looking at another sculpture on the Mt. Hood Community College campus, this time Flying Together by Oregon sculptor Tom Hardy. If this looks vaguely familiar and you don't spend a lot of time at MHCC, you might be thinking of Hardy's other Flying Together, which is similar but not identical to this one. The other one is located outside the Oregon Historical Society, on the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland, and before anyone asks, the downtown one is still there, these are definitely separate sculptures, not a single one that moved to MHCC from downtown like "TriMet" in the previous post. Meanwhile if you're only familiar with the MHCC one but you like Hardy's style, clicking his name above will take you to more posts about other public art he's done around the region.

"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.

La Lucha Sigue (RBG Mural, SW 11th & Yamhill)

Next up, here's a mural by artist Allison McClay, honoring the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You might recall that she passed away shortly before the 2016 election, and the linked post is dated November 13th, 2020, shortly after the 2020 election, when ol' whatshisname was rummaging through his bag of dirty tricks looking for a way to overturn the election, and everyone wondered just how far he'd really go.

The mural is on the side of a building at SW 11th & Yamhill, next to the MAX turnaround. This half-block is home to a couple of other murals, including City United, Country United (2007), and a recent one honoring Portland music history that I haven't finished the post for yet. This post lingered around in drafts for a while too, but it seemed apropos to post it now: It's been four years since the mural went up, and ol' whatsisname is on the ballot again, and the polls are way too close, and I just deleted a whole paragraph wringing my hands about if and when elderly Supreme Court justices ought to retire, and I already know I'm not going to feel any better about all this after posting this, and I'm pretty sure New Zealand simply doesn't have room for all of us if the worst case scenario plays out. So anyway, 3...2...1... posting...

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.

Harrison Square Relief Panel

Some months ago I realized a new incarnation of the legendary[1] Spella Caffe had opened in my neighborhood, specifically in the lobby of the 1970s brutalist Harrison Square office complex. When I went to check it out I realized there was some groovy 1970s art in the lobby that I needed to take a few photos of, so I did, and fortunately it had a legible signature on it so could figure out the rest of the story from there.

This panel was created by Portland sculptor James Lee Hansen, whose work has appeared here a few times before, most recently in a July post about his Autumn Rider, located (a bit incongruously) at a shopping center in Gresham. As for our current subject, Hansen's website just calls it Harrison Square Relief Panel, and the only other info about it I could find on the interwebs comes to us from the July 8th, 1973 Oregonian, which ran a a photo of the freshly-unveiled art. The photo caption is brief but informative:

HANSEN SCULPTURE INSTALLED —- Becky Smith views new sculpture by James Hansen on main floor foyer wall of new First Harrison Square building. Commissioned by Jack J. Saltzman, the work is composed of nine sections, some in polished steel, some in steel given blue, yellow, and black automotive lacquer finishes. Hansen did bronze “Shaman” in front of State Highway Building on East Capitol Campus in Olympia in 1971.

So, working with automotive paint on steel is a cool idea. It occurs to me that it may have been easier to do this in 1973 than it is today; Hansen had the good fortune to be working at a time when cars came in lots of colors, which is not something new car buyers seem to want anymore in 2024. It seems like everyone wants to buy the largest, most threatening truck or SUV they can afford, and they only want them in the blandest colors available: black, white, grey, or beige. Like they're going for the Secret Service VIP motorcade look: Tough and official, and yet not drawing attention to your specific vehicle. I mean, I say that but I just bought a new car earlier this year (a fast little hatchback, not a chonky SUV), and the only available colors that I liked were blue and black, and I somewhat preferred the blue, but they had a black one on the lot while blue would have to be a special order that wouldn't be ready for months, so I got the black one. And the free market will undoubtedly chalk that up as yet another vote against cars coming in colors. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

While looking for that one photo caption, I ran across a number of other vintage news articles about the then-new building that I thought were interesting. So it's time to bust out that Multnomah County library card again, and put on your best disco boots, because here we go...

• 1971, the design for the building was unveiled with great fanfare. One of the last developable blocks in the South Auditorium district
• August 18th & 19th articles on the groundbreaking for the new complex. The second story includes a photo of Mayor Terry Schrunk and Mayor-elect Neil... er, the guy we don't talk about.
• A 1972 photo of the complex under construction, along with a few other cutting-edge modern buildings like the Lincoln Tower condos, a few blocks further south on 1st
• July 1972 photo from the topping-out of the building, featuring pine trees in planters being emplaced by crane. Content warning: The photo also features that one creepy mayor whose name has fortunately been lost to history.
• In other 1972 announcements, the new building would soon be home to a swanky new fine dining restaurant. Which led me to several other stories about the Portland fine dining scene in the 1970s. Which was just as groovy as you'd expect, but just a bit off topic for this post, so I moved all that stuff down to footnote 2.
• The building won a Portland AIA award in June 1973
• October 1974 profile of the main developer behind the complex. The article helpfully explains that "entrepreneur" is a fancy new synonym for "hustler", a word people used to mean as a compliment back in the good old days.
• June 1975: One of the anchor tenants was the local office of Xerox Corp., and they were currently showcasing the shiny new Xerox 9200, a large, cutting-edge photocopying system. These would have been built at the Xerox campus in Silicon Valley, while somewhere in the same complex the company's research division was hard at work on the Xerox Alto, the first computer system with a modern GUI. Which was a revolutionary idea, but one that Xerox made approximately zero dollars from, even as Steve Jobs & Co. wandered around the lab making detailed notes on everything they saw.
• In 1976, the building took part in a previous episode of mural mania here; they went by "supergraphics" at the time. This was seen as a cheap way to liven up the city's recent crop of modern buildings. Which feels like a bit of an indictment of 1970s architecture -- it's only 3 years old and already needs livening up?
• An article about some other art installed around the same time as the Relief Panel, & designed by a local artist, brutalist concrete planters outside the main entrance to the building. I don't think they're there anymore, though I also usually don't pay much attention to concrete planters, so I may have to check again next time I'm getting coffee.

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Footnotes

1. Coffee

Yelp reviews for the previous location on SW 5th between Washington & Alder. 2012 Willamette Week article called them "universally beloved", but then they had gelato at the time, and I'm not sure the new location does. A 2016 article said they had the best coffee in the city (which is kind of a big deal), and imagined it as a sort of caffeinated wormhole connected directly to Rome or Milan. A 2009 Oregonian piece -- when they were still a humble food cart -- also crowned them the best coffee place in town, serving the best gelato in town.

An April 2023 Portland Monthly article on best local coffee places mentions a place out in the Rose City Park neighborhood that uses Spella beans, as a place you can get the coffee without making the trek to the downtown-ish mothership. At some point in the last decade the local media ecosystem collectively decided their readers live on the eastside, and things downtown are now a trek instead of having a convenient central location. Possibly right around the time living close in on the westside (or at least in a trendy or trend-adjacent corner of the westside, i.e. the Pearl, South Waterfront, or NW Portland) became unaffordable on a print media paycheck. This is an unusual development, possibly the first time it's been this way.

2. 70s Restaurants

• December 1972 Journal article on the planned Georges III, an upcoming swanky restaurant planned for Harrison Square, by one of the co-owners of The Captain's Corner, the big movers-and-shakers restaurant of the day. He mentioned that startup costs were expected to run around $200k in 1973 dollars, or around $1.4M today.
• 1973 piece insisting South Auditorium was on the verge of becoming a trendy neighborhood. The new Harrison Square complex was going to get a new fancy restaurant, joining a surprisingly long (as in, nonzero) list of neighborhood restaurants.
• To give you some idea of what a swanky restaurant was like in those days, here's an article from a few months later about The Captain's Corner, where the marquee menu item was the steak & lobster combo ($8.75, or $60.66 in 2023 dollars), which I gather was a bit of premium over the many other surf-n-turf joints around town. Other menu items included chicken livers with wine & mushroom sauce ($4.25 then, $29.26 now), bacon-wrapped scallops in white wine sauce ($4.75 / $32.93) and shrimp curry Bombay ($4.95 / $34.31). The Georges III article above notes that Captain's Corner still employed three of the original Captain's Corner Girls. It doesn't elaborate on what was involved in being a Captain's Corner Girl, but just going by the year it probably had something to do with cocktails or cigars, plus cleavage.
• 1974 review of Georges III. We're told the restaurant was superb, with an affordable and relatively adventurous menu by early 70s standards, including such exotic dishes as "prawns Genoa" and "baked oysters Ralston", whatever those are, or were. You could even order l'escargots if you were up for a walk on the wild side (the reviewer wasn't), and the old standbys like cream of mushroom soup were prepared fresh in house, and the whole bill came to $25.25 for cocktails, wine, dinner, and dessert for three people. At one point the reviewer marvels at the the location:

  Where this once was a rundown, ugly area, there is this sparkling park-like situation, handsome buildings, Portland's most concentrated area of fine apartments, and just generally a sense of well-being.

• A positive review of Georges Three from October 1977 (they had dropped the roman numerals in favor of "Three" a couple of years earlier; maybe they figured a name too much like "George III" was a bad look with the Bicentennial coming up). But within two years it was gone, replaced by a ribs place called "Fast Eddie's", which seems to have stuck around until around 1983, and as far as I know that was the last food or beverage business in the building until Spella arrived in early 2023 or late 2022. Meanwhile, Captain's Corner got a largely negative review in October 1978 and was still open a decade layer. Though at this point it's been gone for decades too.
• One last item and we're done with this restaurant rabbit hole. As of October 1970, the Oregonian still had a section of the paper called "Women's News", as it had been for decades, but on October 12th the headline story concerned an upcoming womens' equality conference. One of the accompanying photos shows a Captain's Corner waitress chatting with a local rep from the local AFL-CIO Waitresses' Union. Another story on the same page relays some remarks by a (female) judge in the state family court system cautioning readers that getting divorced is not all just fun and games; it's expensive, time consuming, and blended families are weird and complicated, and won't someone please think of the children, basically.

The Wave

I was out at the coast recently and stopped in Cannon Beach, and happened to park at a municipal lot a block or so off the main drag. The lot has a couple of public restrooms, and a small but very shiny and sparkly sculpture nearby that seems to get leaned on a lot by people waiting for someone in the restrooms. I took a couple of photos when it (the art) wasn't in use, so here they are. One thing I didn't see was a nameplate or any kind of indication who made it or what it was called, but I correctly assumed the city or local tourism office or someone was bound to have a public art page covering Cannon Beach, aand I was right again. So thanks to that, I can report that this is called The Wave, and it was made by Northwest artist Sharon Warman Agnor, and a local news site in Vancouver (WA) interviewed her back in 2017. I don't know the exact year it was made or when it arrived at the beach, but apparently Cannon Beach has a program similar to Lake Oswego where the city puts art on display for a year and then asks the public to vote on which one (if any) to buy and add to the permanent collection. The walking tour guides say The Wave won the voting after its trial year in town, but doesn't say what year that was. I really thought this detail was important I could probably just start calling or emailing people; it's a small town and it seems like everyone who actually lives there knows each other to some degree, so someone is bound to remember.

Reading Rooms, Willow Creek MAX station

The next installment in the ongoing public art thing takes us out to the Willow Creek MAX station, out in the westside 'burbs, where we're taking a look at the station's oversized teracotta tables and chairs. TriMet's Blue Line Public Art Guide describes the furniture and the general theme of the stop:

Early plans for a library branch at this station inspired the theme of reading and literature. Though the library is no longer planned, the theme blossomed, resulting in the creation of several living rooms, places where one can curl up with a good book under the cherry trees. The cherry tree was chosen because of the role it has played in literature from different cultures.

Cast concrete furniture is clustered in groups. Literary references are sandblasted onto the backs of the chairs and on tabletops. Word scramble puzzles under the three shelters contain names of authors and characters from children’s books. Letters from the world’s alphabets are randomly tossed in seven locations along the bus and light rail platforms.

A September 1998 Oregonian piece by the paper's architecture critic (back in the olden days of yore when newspapers could afford architecture critics) offers a bit more detail, crediting Seattle artist Norie Sato for the design:

* Willow Creek/SW 185th Street: Although it had one of the smallest budgets, this station in a few years is apt to be one of the nicest. Using inexpensive, off-the-shelf Victorian-themed furniture, artist Sato created a series of outdoor "reading rooms" for a proposed branch library. The design team artists also successfully fought Tri-Met's objections to blooming trees, which require higher maintenance, to create a station worth an unplanned stop.

This post sat around in Drafts for several years before I finally figured out who designed it, which is one of those pesky little details I like to know before I hit 'Publish' if at all possible. If you look at the Tri-Met public art guide I linked to, you might notice that it generally offers little or no information about who created most of the art along the Blue Line. These glaring omissions were not accidental. As I mentioned in a 2018 post about the Milikan Way MAX station art, this is an enduring legacy of the silly late-80s and early-90s culture wars, back when right-wing busybodies had nothing better to do than fill their adult diapers over a few examples of controversial art funded by You, The American Taxpayer™. (If that era was before your time, or you just generally don't follow art news that closely, the Wiki bios of photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano might be a good place to start.)

The important thing to know about that historical episode is that it happened right around Peak Gingrich, and so the GOP outrage led to a few years' moratorium on any new public art in all federally-funded projects, which was long enough for that particular culture war to blow over and the GOP to find something new to go shrieking about. If I recall correctly they switched over to impeaching the president for having an affair, while they were all quietly having affairs too, but that's a whole other story. The moratorium happened to coincide with the design work for phase 1 of the Westside MAX line, from downtown Portland out to 185th. So, officially, everything decorative along that stretch of track was considered Design and not Art. It was all, officially, a collaborative effort by the whole Westside MAX Design Team, each element contributing to a single unified (and uncontroversial) theme at each station. No individual credit was given, and if the individual bits of design had names, the public was not supposed to ever find out what they were called or who made them, or else the whole city gets stomped by a mile-high Gingrich kaiju or something. I mean, in reality that almost certainly won't happen; the Culture War industry currently has bigger fish to fry, like banning vaccines, and burning books, and persecuting non-Aryans, and ending democracy once and for all, forever. It's not that they aren't still mad about art; it's just that everyone who'd be detained for making decadent art is already destined for the camps for any number of other reasons. Besides, they have their own art and artists now, like this guy

As it turned out, the MAX line was delayed several years because tunneling through the West Hills turned out to be a lot more complicated than anyone had expected, and the federal ban actually expired a few years before the line opened. So they were able to tell us a few names and titles here and there, like Core Sample Time Line at the underground Washington Park station. Other info sorta-leaked out later via an obscure, now-defunct RACC web server (RACC being Portland's regional public art agency), as with Transplant at the Elmonica MAX station. That server was for the agency's "design roster", listing local artists with past experience handling public commissions and the bureaucratic stuff that comes with them, and a track record of getting quality work done on time and within budget. The program still exists, and a recent (2017-2020) collection of artists' resumes includes a couple of references to prior work on MAX projects a quarter-century ago, and to the Willow Creek station specifically, but that didn't give me enough to go on, and years went by until I took another look at this post and happened to search the library's newspaper database with exactly the right search terms.

The really sad thing about all this is that the proposed library never happened. They did open one at a different MAX stop closer to Hillsboro, but it closed after a few years, and the area even lost the longtime Tanasbourne Library after a bond measure for a new building failed, and the existing version of it lost its lease in a mini-mall on 185th & Evergreen and had nowhere to go, and now the only option nearby is the Aloha Community Library, a scrappy underdog nonprofit (as in, it gets zero government dollars and relies on volunteers to keep the doors open.) down at the shopping center at Kinnaman and Farmington, several miles away.

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.

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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.