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...

Out of the Brambles

Ok, so today we're at the Lents/Foster MAX station to look at Out of the Brambles, the multicolored sculpture on the west side of the elevated train platform. (Recall that 'today' is a very flexible word here on this humble blog, this time even more than usual. We'll get to that in a bit.) This sculpture was created by Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre, who longtime Gentle Reader(s) might remember from old posts about Connections at the Multnomah County offices on Hawthorne, and Second Growth at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. His description of it, from a Wayback Machine copy of an old page about it:

A common theme during interviews of Lents community members was childhood memories of berry picking. Formidable defenses allow these fruiting vines to survive, reproduce and provide sustenance for animals and humans; berry plants also protect the earth under them, the water beside them, and the multitude of small animals and birds within their thickets. A symbol of tenacious nature, berries helped support the coming of civilization, and will remain to engulf and dismantle what we have built after our tenure on Earth. Berry vines are also a metaphor for life’s struggles: getting past the thorns to the fruits. Wild berries transcend the differences between all the cultures that have populated this area. They were revered and heavily utilized by Native populations, and have been loved, hybridized, cultivated and tended by each succeeding generation and ethnic group.

I had linked to the original page in a 2013 post about Lents Hybrids, the other art at the same MAX station. That and a post at a long-defunct neighborhood business blog were the only mentions I could find about it on the interwebs, and because 2013 was roughly a billion internet years ago -- internet years are still a thing, right? -- both links have long since gone stale. The vanished lents dot biz site went away years ago, was not archived anywhere, and the name now belongs to a shady domain squatter page, which is why I'm not linking to it. And since I didn't quote the relevant blog post of theirs at the time, I have no idea what they actually said about the art here. Oh well.

The rest of my notes for this post seemed to naturally fall into a rough timeline. Partly about the art itself, and partly the chain of events leading up to this post happening in late 2020 (which I realize might be completely uninteresting to everyone besides me):

• The MAX Green Line opened on September 12th 2009. As part of the grand opening, TriMet created public art tour guides for the I-205 and downtown parts of the new line, which I treated as sort of a "gotta catch 'em all" todo list for a while. Note that both of those links are also Wayback Machine copies, again because link rot. At least they left the pages up until sometime in 2016, which I guess is a respectable amount of time.
• Here are a few old posts from 2006-07 when they were busy building the downtown part of the new line. Not really relevant to anything in this post, but they came up in a search and 2006 is roughly 4 billion internet years ago, so I figured I'd work them in somewhere.
• I finally got around to riding the semi-new line on July 2nd 2010. I know this because I thought I'd be hip with the latest social media technology and live-tweet my semi-thrilling adventures riding the train out to a suburban mall and back during a heavy rainstorm. While taking photos with a new Blackberry -- my first phone with a camera -- and posting them to a long-defunct add-on service called "Twitpic", which is why the photo links in that thread don't work anymore.
• The page I quoted about Out of the Brambles gives a date of 2012, so it went in after the MAX line opened (and after my little 2010 snarkfest). I guess this would explain why it wasn't listed in the 2009 TriMet art guide. The other 2010 photos look dark and miserable enough that I suspect I would have skipped Out of the Brambles that day anyway, had it been there, since you can't see it without getting off the train.
• On the other hand, the entire "Lents Town Center" area has been completely transformed in the years after I took those original photos. The Portland Development Commission -- the autonomous agency tasked with doing the thing they know not to call "urban renewal" anymore -- had dreamed of gentrifying this area for decades and finally got their wish, and the mishmash of parking lots and low-rise commercial buildings has been transformed into a few square blocks of apartment buildings -- unfortunately of uniform height and fairly nondescript style. So it might have been interesting to have a few 'before' photos for comparison, but it was raining that day and I didn't realize what was coming, so I don't. Oh well.
• As for why it showed up after the line opened, my personal theory is that it wasn't part of the original plan, but when people got a look at the hulking grey concrete structure for the MAX platform, it was a lot uglier in person than in the early-2000s CGI that had sold people on the plan, and something had to be done. And Out of the Brambles does a great job in that respect, as the concrete train platform becomes just a neutral backdrop instead of the focus of attention.
• A bit later I realized I could get a few public art posts out of those poor-quality Blackberry photos, and since it's the internet (and nobody's paying me to do this) I could just make some self-deprecating remarks about the photos instead of going back again to take better ones. So I spent a bit of time in December 2013 writing them up and tagged them all with "greenline" in case anybody wants to binge (briefly) on bad photos of circa-2009 public art. The Lents Hybrids post I mentioned earlier was part of this batch, and in putting it together I found that one long-gone blog post mentioning Out of the Brambles, and it went on one of my todo lists. Not as a super high priority, but as something to track down at whatever point I was in the area again and remembered to look at the right todo list.
• Just for comparison, the Second Growth post happened around this time too. That post went from taking photos to hitting "Publish" in 5 days, which goes to show that I can sometimes get things done in a reasonable amount of time, so long as I remember not to forget, and prioritize (or misprioritize) getting them done ahead of various other professional and personal goals.
• While putting this current post together, I realized Chabre made a couple of other things at the same MAX station, with their own separate names and everything, so two more todo items just went onto another list. Obviously there's no ETA on if or when those might show up here, but they definitely won't appear before this dumb pandemic is over.
• I did check the library's database of Oregonian back issues, and found a few articles mentioning Second Growth (like this review) from around then when the MAX Yellow Line opened, or an entertaining interview from 2002. I don't see anything similar for Out of the Brambles, I think largely because the Oregonian no longer has the staff, or the spare column inches, or the inclination to publish stories about art these days.
• Earlier in 2014, the Twitpic service either went out of business or was about to, so I had to go back and replace all my embedded Twitpics with Flickr copies of the same photos. I'd apparently had the foresight to make backups of my crappy Blackberry photos, or maybe I'd been warned this was coming, I don't recall now. Anyway, I re-uploaded them to Flickr this time and updated the affected posts, in yet another episode in the long twilight struggle against bit rot. The end of Twitpic was inevitable after Twitter introduced their own builtin photo sharing feature, but I was kind of sad to see them go, since embedding those photos in blog posts involved a completely unapproved kludge I'd hacked together somehow. I have no idea how it worked anymore, but I was just a little proud of it at the time.
• Next we skip forward to July 2016, when I finally had a reason to be out in that corner of town anyway, namely to visit the new-ish Zoiglhaus brewpub just steps away from the MAX station. So if you don't care for this set of photos, I'm going to blame it on me starting to drift off into a pilsner-assisted schnitzel coma for the afternoon.
• And then the hard work of writing a blog post began, by which I mean those photos sat around in Flickr for about a year, until I created a draft post for them in June 2017, saved it, and didn't touch it again until a few days ago. By which I mean mid-October 2020, in case other stuff comes up and I forget about this post again for another few years or whatever.

Second Growth

Here are a few photos of Second Growth, the art at the Albina/Mississippi MAX station. It follows a common design in recent TriMet art: A visual riff on the local neighborhood, set on top of a pole so casual vandals can't reach it. I think I'm going to start calling these things "lollipops". Anyway, TriMet's yellow line Art guide describes the concept behind the station:

Wayne Chabre created symbols of the indomitable spirit of the community.

• A bronze, tree-like vine flowers with forms representing the arts of the area.
• Bronze benches incorporate images from neighborhood industries.
• The community map by Chabre and Jeanne McMenemy features lyrics of songs from cultures of historic importance to Albina.
• Works by Jacob Pander and Bill Rutherford are reproduced in porcelain enamel on steel.

Second Growth is the bronze tree-like vine. The artist's website describes it:

This piece celebrates the history of the surrounding neighborhood, where jazz clubs flourished in the 20s & 30s; an area that is now largely industrial, but which continues to re-imagine itself. It is home to such diverse enterprises as a brewery and an art glass factory, two of several businesses that are represented in the sculpture.

Chabre also created Connections at the county office building on Hawthorne, which I rather liked. There's an obvious family resemblance between the two pieces.

A Daily Journal of Commerce story about Second Growth says "The piece of art – a plant bursting from the pavement and flowering into musical and art icons – is designed to symbolize the surrounding area’s urban renewal rebirth after years of battling neglect and racism." This interpretation is sort of... problematic. Redemption via urban renewal is not, strictly speaking, what really happened to NE Portland. Not during the heyday of urban renewal in the 60s and 70s, and not now in the era of transit-driven gentrification. I realize the DJC is a business paper focusing on the construction trade, but still. When the PDC bulldozers came to this part of town, they were not greeted as liberators. Call me crazy if you want, but I like to think that historical accuracy still matters.

Connections

This installment in obscure stuff around town takes us to the Multnomah County offices at SE Hawthorne & Grand Avenue. Flanking the main entrance are a pair of ornate bronze panels, the left one depicting a rural landscape, the right showing urban scenes. This is Connections, a 2005 piece by the Northwest sculptor Wayne Chabre. His description of it:

The Multnomah Building houses the business offices of Multnomah County, the most populous county in Oregon. These two panels frame the main entry, and represent the urban and rural aspects of the county. Bridges, roads and water images are metaphors for the County’s many governmental functions. Bridges are the central design element on the urban panel; they allow a city divided by a major river to function as a cohesive whole, as the County “bridges” many diverse communities, facilitating cooperative action and successful societal functioning.

In the rural panel, the arterial (County) roads converge from the periphery as capillaries in the circulatory system, supporting urban life by the work of the agricultural base and the dramatic beauty of the Columbia Gorge scenic preserve. These panels also suggest Portland’s connection to the Pacific Rim with the oblique reference to the Asian scroll.

The Portland Public Art blog liked it, which is rare praise indeed.