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.

Akebono Statue, Waikiki

Next up we've got a rare semi-topical post: I was over in Honolulu again recently and noticed an enormous (and also exactly life-sized) statue of the legendary sumo wrestler Akebono Tarō that I didn't recall seeing before. So I took a few photos and continued on my way. Shortly after flying back, it was announced that he had passed away at age 54, after several years of health problems. So this post is relevant to a news headline you might have seen recently, for once.

There's a statue of him in Hawaii because he was born here, and grew up over in Waimanalo, a little farm town over on the windward side of Oʻahu. He became fascinated by the sport and eventually moved to Japan to seek his fortune as a wrestler, adopting the stage name "Akebono". In 1993 he became the first non-Japanese wrestler to achieve the rank of yokozuna, the very highest grand champion rank in the sport, making him just the 64th yokozuna since the beginning of (surviving) written records back in the 1640s. This was good for about 15 minutes of fame on the US mainland, a degree of minor celebrity in Hawaii, and of course fame and a great deal of curiosity in Japan. After retiring in 2001, he tried his hand at kickboxing and MMA before ending up in pro wrestling until old injuries and ill health caught up to him in the late 2010s. And if you think I'm going into more detail than usual, let me warn you about the perils of sumo Wikipedia. Which is a serious rabbit hole, dug by an improbably large rabbit.

As for the statue, it was created by local artist Barbara Kamille (a.k.a. "KaMille"), obviously sometime after 1993 (but I don't know when exactly), and was originally located at a Waimanalo mini-mall. It was either knocked over or fell over on its own once in 2016 but was quickly repaired, though some damage is still visible on his right foot if you look closely. Then the store it sat in front of closed in 2022, and the owners put the word out that it needed a new home ASAP. The owner of Sam's Kitchen, a Waikiki seafood restaurant, randomly stumbled across it while searching Craigslist for "champion", that being a leading brand of industrial-grade bakery mixer, and it sounds like he was immediately transfixed by the statue and knew he had to have it, and the rest is history.

There isn't a lot about the artist on the internet, but there are a few other KaMille sculptures in Waikiki on the grounds of the Hilton Hawaiian Village complex, including a menehune king, a deer spirit, and a group of tapa cloth makers working. The location is probably why I don't remember seeing any of them and have no photos. You are virtually guaranteed to get lost there, if you can even find your way in. It's supposed to be one of those all-encompassing resorts that is deliberately hard to leave, like most of Las Vegas. Which is great for the sort of tourist who gets freaked out by a little urban grit, a category that somehow includes many Japanese tourists as well as the sort of US mainland tourist who just comes here to see Pearl Harbor and generally wallow in all things World War II. Anyway, I like a good challenge, and now that I know there's something to see in there, I may have to go explore the Hilton labyrinth sometime if I'm in the area.

Lahui

Next up we're visiting Lahui (1992), a sculpture by Sean Kekamakupa‘a Lee Loy Browne at the entrance to Honolulu's Kaka‘ako Neighborhood Park. Kaka‘ako is sort of like Portland's South Waterfront, an old industrial area being forcibly gentrified with a great deal of governmental involvement and investment. The park itself was formerly an oceanfront landfill, later sealed and capped with a city park around 1990, which IIRC was shortly after the federal EPA clarified that oceanfront landfills were officially no bueno. Understandably you are not encouraged to go in the water here, and there's no beach to bum around on anyway, just waves crashing on a rough stone seawall.

The word "lahui" roughly means "nation" in Hawaiian. Which is understandably a very loaded word in Hawaii. So instead of telling us more about the art, a search on the name brings up links like:

• An academic article: "Urban aloha ‘aina: Kaka‘ako and a decolonized right to the city"
• The state Office of Hawaiian Affairs's Kaka‘ako Makai plan, which gave OHA a few chunks of valuable land around the edges of the park, as compensation for $200M the state owed but had neglected to provide since 1978. Supposed to develop as a revenue source for the benefit of Native Hawaiian communities. Or that's the plan anyway. A look at the city GIS system shows the OHA land is mostly surface parking lots at present.
• A controversial 2018 homeless crackdown in the park
• A 2018 event with the artist at the University of Redlands in California, which came up as a search result because the page includes a long list of public art credits, including Lahui here.

Browne also created the Kresser memorial in downtown, a couple of statues of Hawaiian royals around Waikiki, and a variety of other things that have appeared here over the years.

Fred Kresser Memorial, Honolulu

The next stop on our long-running public art tour is another bit of abstract art in downtown Honolulu, at the corner of Bishop St. and Hotel St. This is the Fred Kresser Memorial Sculpture, honoring a local businessman who was one of seven people who died in the bizarre 1983 Sentosa cable car accident in Singapore, in which a tall drilling derrick on an oil rig snagged overhead cable car lines as it the rig was towed underneath. This was blamed on negligence by several parties including the oil rig and towing operator; the cable car system was repaired and remains a major tourist attraction. I mention this because I think I'd like to visit Singapore someday, going by multiple reports from friends and relatives, and would rather not be turned away at their reportedly amazing airport for bringing up this unfortunate isolated incident from a very long time ago that was somebody else's fault anyway. I'm only mentioning it at all because I can't explain the art otherwise, ok?

Apparently there's another small memorial somewhere along the Mo‘ili‘ili side of the Ala Wai Canal, just titled "Dad's Rock", but I don't know where it is and have no photos of it.

The sculpture was created by local artist Sean K.L. Browne, who also did the King Kalakaua statue in Waikiki as well as Lahui, the abstract sculpture at the entrance to Kaka'ako Neighborhood Park. I also have a draft post about Lahui that's been hanging around unpublished for ages now, so I think I'll try to finish both today and then update them to point at each other.

Rockwood Sunrise

Next up, here's a slideshow of Rockwood Sunrise, the large sorta-triumphal arch structure at the Rockwood MAX station. This was created by Seattle artist Dan Corson, who also did Mercurial Sky (the lightshow for the Director Park canopy, downtown Portland), and Nepenthes, the series of giant illuminated pitcher plants along SW Davis in Old Town. I liked both of those, and I think I like this too. Not quite enough to make any further pilgrimages out to Rockwood just to see it again, but hey.

TriMet's Blue Line art guide describes it:

• Tall, brightly painted steel rays constitute a highly visible landmark for the station and a beacon of civic pride for the community
• Imagery was inspired by the ferris wheel — once an annual feature in Rockwood, the bold colors of the Hispanic culture, and the universal symbolism of the sunrise
• Translucent tips of the rays illuminate as the trains arrive and depart the station
• Sunrise image also appears in the shelter glass pattern designed by Corson

This was added back in 2011, along with Civic Drive Iris further east, after the City of Gresham and TriMet scored some much-needed urban renewal money and (as usual) had to spend some of it on Art somewhere. And it just so happened that the eastside MAX Blue Line -- the original 1980s MAX line -- had somehow been built without Whimsical Public Art at each station, and this obviously needed to be remedied somehow someday. So retrofitting existing MAX stations with new art became a thing, killing two birds with one stainless steel whatzit.

The urban renewal effort was precipitated by the 2003 closure of the old Rockwood Fred Meyer store[1]. The store sat empty for a number of years after the closure and it quickly became clear the store had been a regional retail tentpole for the surrounding area. Other businesses closed. Crime was up, pedestrian traffic was way down. Gresham is close enough to Portland that planners still aspire to be good urbanists, and they've probably seen all the literature about declining inner-ring suburbs and wanted to ward off that outcome. The key thing to know is that closed/abandoned big box stores are really hard to reuse[2]. The buildings are just too big for most retailers to make use of, and difficult to subdivide, and luring a replacement big box retailer is harder than you might think because many of them really want to use standard floorplans, with standard store fixtures & displays that look exactly the same in every store. Then you can just order a thousand of those and use them worldwide, and not have to customize things based on what your store was before it was yours. And long story short, Gresham concluded that reusing an old Fred Meyer building was a nonstarter, and it was a great chance to build something denser and more urban, seeing as it's right next to a MAX station.

Gresham's Redevelopment Commission called the project "Rockwood Rising" for a while, but "Downtown Rockwood".

A 2009 blog post from the Wilkes East Neigborhood Association (blog last updated in 2013) was disappointed at lack of progress redeveloping the site, and yeah, the area hasn't completely filled in with new construction, and there's no way to know what the area would be like if there was still just a vacant Fred Meyer there, now abandoned for over two decades. But it's hard to imagine the area would be better off that way.

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Footnotes

1. Fred Meyer stores don't close very often in the Portland area. There was an original and very small store downtown that closed sometime in the 70s or 80s, after decades where every Fred Meyer ad ended with someone muttering "Not Available at 6th and Alder" as quickly as possible. Then out on the urban periphery they closed a few stores in less-affluent areas.

The Walnut Park store that closed in 1989, store eventually became home to Portland Police North Precinct. Boys & Girls Club just south of there, and Transition Projects just across MLK.

82nd & Foster closed in 2017 and quickly transformed into the Emmert International Marketplace mall, anchored by a large Shun Fat grocery store.

2. References on the vacant big-box problem below. The most egregious example of this I've seen was in the Deep South in the late 90s, around when Wal-Mart was transitioning chain-wide to newer and much larger Super Wal-Mart stores. Land was cheap and there were usually no pesky land use or zoning laws to worry about, so the cheapest possible approach was usually to build fresh on ex-farmland really far from town, and just walk away from the old stores that were being replaced. And when every business and every developer does this in a headlong rush, you get a sort of creosote bush development pattern, where the "good part of town" is an ever-expanding ring (for small values of "ever") rushing outward as fast as it can, abandoning previous generations of perfectly good infrastructure after a few short years of being the hot new area. Eventually Georgia realized it couldn't afford to build the distant Outer Perimeter freeway that developers fantasized about, which would have enabled a vast sprawl zone larger than several of the smaller European countries. But the newcomers are still coming and have to go somewhere; I'm just not sure how they're making it work if they aren't building more freeways now. Anyway:

• Next City: "How Abandoned Big-Box Stores Can Bring Communities Together"
• Community Playmaker: Big Box Redevelopment: Opportunities In Old Malls
• Institute for Local Self-Reliance: "Preventing Dark Malls & Vacant Big Boxes"
• Strong Towns: "An Empty Big-Box Store Is a Lesson In 'Commercial Density'"
• The Big-Box Store Dilemma: What to Do When a Large Retailer Closes

central eastside murals, october 2023

Here's a slideshow of various new and new-ish murals around Portland's Central Eastside as of a couple of months ago. My mom was in town back in October, and she had somehow figured out that a.) outdoor murals are kind of a big deal here, and b.) I knew a thing or two about the phenomenon and might be up for playing tour guide. So here are some photos I took that day. Also, various food carts and twee little shops were visited in between all the art appreciation, and a fully artisanal, small-batch Central Eastside tourist experience was had by all that day, minus the beer part, since mom never really got into that.

Most of these were taken at either the Electric Blocks area near OMSI, or a previously-nondescript warehouse building at SE 8th & Alder. The outside of that warehouse has been sort of divvied up, with various artists each getting a panel of the exterior to work with. If I was really focused on this as a project like I was for a while back in the 2010s, I'd probably give each panel its own post and link to each artist's Instagram and find other work that they've done. But this year I've had enough trouble just maintaining the one-post-per-month bare minimum and that sounded like an excessive amount of work (unpaid (and unrequested) volunteer work, at that) to take on right now, so that stuff is left as an exercise for the reader. I did at least take photos of artists' signatures where possible, and those are typically Instagram IDs these days, so you at least have that as a starting point if you want to learn more about a particular mural.

Sulawesi, SW 17th & Morrison

Back in February I finally hit "Publish" on a post about Icarus at Kittyhawk, the Lee Kelly art at the Beaverton Central MAX station. That post was stuck in Drafts for ages because I didn't know what it was called, until I finally found that crucial detail on a walking/driving tour map of Kelly art around the Portland area. I said at the time:

In fact the map includes a lamentable number of others that I wasn't aware of and have never visited. Somehow I feel like I have to add them to the ol' TODO list now, although for the life of me I'm not sure why.

...and sure enough, here's a TODO item from that map. This is Sulawesi (2008), on the West Portland Physical Therapy building at SW 17th and Morrison. I actually like this one. It's a reasonable size, and somehow it actually fits with the building it's on (the circa-1958 Annand Building) and looks like it's always been there, despite being about a half-century newer. Usually at this point I would go off on a tangent about the cool midcentury building, but I haven't found any interesting info about it by name or by address. I can tell you the building once housed an office of the Equitable Life of Iowa insurance firm starting in 1958, and they were seemingly hiring new stenographers every few months, year after year, and after that other tenants came and went over time, and I have no historical anecdotes to share about any of them, or the building, or anything really. Which at least makes this an easy post to finish, so there's that, I guess.

I'm glad I checked that walking map again before hitting 'Publish', since I had gotten the name of the art wrong. Sulawesi (the correct name) is an island in Indonesia, the 11th largest island on the planet and home to 20 million people. I almost mistakenly called the art "Surabaya", which is a city on the island of Java, elsewhere in Indonesia. The Surabaya metropolitan area is home to about 10 million people. So that would have been kind of embarrassing. Searching for more info under the correct name comes back with a result for "Sulawesi I" (1997) a similar Kelly sculpture outside a library on the Oregon State University campus. The OSU one is described as "A wall-mounted sculpture with silver leaf with looping and linear forms reminiscent of script." That could be the origin of the name here too, or it's named for resembling the weirdly-shaped island itself, which looks a lot a letter in some unknown alphabet.

Autumn Rider

So here we've got a few photos of Autumn Rider, a James Lee Hansen sculpture located -- a bit improbably -- in a median at the Gresham Town Fair mini-mall on Eastman Parkway in central Gresham. Going by the name I imagine it's a sibling to Hansen's Winter Rider No. 2 on the transit mall in downtown Portland.

By coincidence, a recent Oregon Art Beat episode ran a profile of Hansen recently on the occasion of his 98th birthday:

If you're one of those people who enjoys tracking down places and things you've seen on this weird little humble blog (I've heard occasional rumors that people like this exist, at any rate.), you can obviously drive there, park a few steps from Autumn Rider and check it out that way. Which is what I did, since this was just the first item on a lengthy todo list. But this is also pretty close to the Gresham City Hall MAX station, and one of the few things you'll see on the short walk to or from the train is Gresham's own MadCow Brewing, which opened in 2021. I haven't actually been there yet, but I like to stay on top of these things, so I may have to make another trip out that way. Maybe at that point this photoset will get bigger and include the same art but with close-ups of raindrops or snow on it. Who knows.

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.