All That Is Gold

The next stop on the mural tour takes us to NE 33rd & Sandy, where All That Is Gold is hidden down a gated alley next to the Laurelhurst Studios building. The mural was created in 2014 by Gage Hamilton and Zach Yarrington, whose names you might recognize from innumerable Forest For The Trees murals over the last few years.

The title's painted up toward the top of the building and is hard to see from street level; I'm not sure where it's meant to be viewed from. The iceberg theme around the alley entrance made me think the title said "Cold" rather than "Gold". Luckily I ran across some photos and making-of videos that cleared this up before I hit Publish. That would have been sort of embarrassing. Not as bad as the New York Times spinning lurid tales of Iraqi WMDs that, um, never existed, but embarrassing by this humble blog's usual standards.

The Future Will Be Hairy

The next mural on our tour is The Future Will be Hairy, on the upper story of a building in the 2100 block of NE Sandy. It's another Forest for the Trees mural, from the inaugural 2013 festival. That Oregonian article has much better photos than mine; I wish I knew where they were taken from, since I couldn't find a better angle than what you see here. Anyway, the mural's a collaboration by three artists whose work has appeared here before: Zach Yarrington, who created the huge Everything is Everything in SE Portland; Gage Hamilton, who did the DeSoto Building mural for the 2014 Forest for the Trees; and Madsteez, who collaborated on the Clyde Drexler mural at SE 9th & Clay. A page at MadeByBand has the inevitable bunch of photos of the mural being painted. A thing I didn't realize until now is that the 2013 festival also featured a limited edition line of clothing & shoes. Apparently you could buy a "The Future Will Be Hairy" bow tie, or even custom Chuck Taylors. That sounds odd, but we're already putting our old airport carpet pattern on every imaginable consumer product, so it's a bit late to complain about some mural-themed high tops.

DeSoto Building Mural

Here's a slideshow of the new mural on NW Portland's DeSoto Building, on the North Park Blocks between Couch & Davis. Portland's Contemporary Craft Museum, moved here in 2007, triggering a financial crisis that led to the museum's absorption by the local art college. Meanwhile the first floor has housed a series of short-lived fancy restaurants. The building's in a strange spot, neither Pearl District nor Old Town, and doesn't seem to get the foot traffic it would need for businesses to survive here. Apparently the building was originally a DeSoto car dealership. DeSoto was a division of Chrysler, defunct since 1960, and it in turn was named for the notorious Spanish conquistador pictured in the mural.

The mural was painted for this year's Forest for the Trees festival by Gage Hamilton, who's also director of the festival. I'm not sure what the other component of the mural is; to me it looks sort of like a black feather boa, but I'm not sure whether that was the intent or not.