"Doctors" (OHSU)

We still have a few items left on our tour of public art at OHSU, because doctors really like buying art. This one's actually called Doctors, in fact; it's by Bonnie Bronson, whose work has appeared here a few times before: Nepali Window downtown, and the painted panels on her husband Lee Kelly's Leland One and the untitled sculpture at NE 72nd & Fremont.

Untitled, NE 72nd & Fremont

Today's adventure in local art takes us to yet another obscure, rusty Lee Kelly sculpture from the early 1970s. Today's example (which I found in the Smithsonian art inventory database, and nowhere else on the internet) is simply called Untitled, and it sits outside a US Bank branch at NE 72nd & Fremont, just south of Sandy Boulevard. The location is quite a busy area, but the sculpture is surprisingly hard to see. It's set back from the street, near the bank drive-thru window; it's really quite small, by Kelly's usual standards; and the rust color makes it blend in with the surrounding landscaping. On closer examination, it's obviously a smaller sibling (and as it turns out, a predecessor) to Leland One, a big Kelly sculpture in my neighborhood that I've snarked about here a few times, by which I mean more than a few times.

As with Leland One, the highlight here is the set of orange enamel panels on the front, which were created by Bonnie Bronson, Kelly's wife. The catalog for a 2011 PNCA retrospective of her work mentions this Untitled briefly in passing, but doesn't include a photo. The only solo work of hers I've covered here (so far) is Nepali Window near SW 4th & Alder downtown, which I was quite a fan of.

I keep pointing out I'm not a huge fan of Kelly's work, yet for some reason I keep tracking these things down anyway. It's totally fair to wonder why I keep doing this. I suppose the sheer snark value is a big reason, but I think it's also that most of these sculptures have lapsed into utter obscurity over the last few decades (perhaps rightly so) and there aren't any photos of them on the net, and they don't appear on the usual walking maps and tourist guides and public art brochures. So the odds are pretty good that I'll have yet another top Google ranking for something nobody on earth will ever search for. That's kind of been a staple of this humble blog since way back in 2005. I've never claimed to be a hipster, but you could say I've been into stuff you probably haven't heard of since before it was cool. Locally sourced, too.

Nepali Window

I was walking along SW Alder a while back and noticed this mysterious object on the side of the Central Plaza parking garage, between 3rd & 4th. It looked sort of art-like, somehow, but there wasn't a sign anywhere giving a title or artist, so I filed it away as a mystery. Then I was looking at the 2007 downtown public art map I've mentioned a few times here, putting together a list of things that I haven't posted about yet (and it was a surprisingly short list). One of the unblogged items was something called Nepali Window, which I realized was in the right general area as the mysterious parking garage object. Which does sort of look like a window if you squint just right, come to think of it. So I googled the title and artist, found a few photos, and realized I had a winner, and thus a blog post was born. So that's the exciting internet search saga behind what you're reading now.

Nepali Window is a 1989 piece by the late Bonnie Bronson, who was married to Lee Kelly of Leland 1 fame. (She created the orange metal side panels on Leland One, which are the best part of the thing.) Apparently this piece was part of a larger series inspired by travels in Nepal; OHSU has a companion piece in its vast art collection, slthough the photo seems to indicate it's tucked away in a conference room or something. I also ran across a Bronson sculpture on eBay that references the OHSU Nepali Window and gives a bit more background about it.

So the name got me wondering: Is this anything like what an actual window in Nepal looks like? I mean, obviously it's abstract art and whatnot, and it's a bit déclassé asking what it "looks like" or what it's "about". But, y'know, I was curious. I actually thought about asking a Nepali coworker and maybe doing the very first interview this humble blog's ever had. But I quickly realized he'd just tell me to google it and stop asking stupid questions. So I did. Short answer: Actual windows in Nepal look nothing like this, except for being square-ish most of the time. But they're interesting in their own right, and possibly I ought to be crowdfunded to go investigate further, maybe.

Before I knew the name or had any info about Nepali Window, I was thinking I'd do a post about the "mystery artwork" anyway, and then mostly talk about the parking garage since I didn't know anything about the sculpture itself. So I dug around in the Oregonian archives a bit and found a few articles about the garage. One of the articles had a cool retro under-construction photo of it, so that and the rest of the history stuff ended up in a post over on pdx tales, this humble blog's equally humble history sibling.

Leland 1

"Leland 1" is the official name of the ugly sculpture I continue to think of as "Rusting Chunks No. 5". That link, and this one provide some additional info about the artists. Apparently other works by one of the artists have been stolen. And this one hasn't, probably just because it's so big. Still, you'd think that a few enterprising meth tweakers could make short work of it, score a fair amount of money for the scrap metal, and do society a big favor in the process. But no. Not so far, anyway.

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That abomination should not be confused with an unrelated artwork that came up during a search on the phrase "leland 1". I rather like this painting. Its actual title is "1994 X", where X is the Roman numeral. Seems like quite a sensible naming convention to me. The "leland 1" connection is that the artist's last name is Leland, and this is the first of six images on his faculty bio at the University of Tennessee.

Meanwhile, the (again unrelated) leland.com simply offers a photo of a happy middle-aged couple, with the caption "Future home of leland.com". One could argue it's actually the current home of leland.com, technically, and it's just a very small home. But it's probably not worth arguing about. The Leland Report, once again unrelated, covers Leelanau County, a beautiful corner of the Michigan lakeshore, and a place that I'd never heard of and was entirely unfamilar with until just now. It's an oddly fitting place to end up, since outsiders often wrongly imagine that all of Michigan is a barren landscape of rusting chunks, which sort of brings us full circle, or something.

Updated: Linky from Edward Blank.

Updated 7/31/2010: Added a Google map and a Flickr slideshow, for added tasty modern interweb goodness. Sorry 'bout that, dialup users...

Updated 10/5/2020: Replaced that crufty old Flickr slideshow with a non-Flash one as Chrome is pulling the plug on Flash support at the end of the year. The replacement is not exactly tasty or modern, but at least it'll work next year. Also enlarged the map to fit the margins this humble blog has had for mumble-mumble years, since I was in the neighborhood anyway.