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.

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.

Icarus at Kittyhawk

Next up we've got a fresh entry in a couple of long-running projects here. Some years ago this humble blog was largely about public art, in Portland or wherever else I happened to bump into it. When a new MAX line opened, there would always be a whole new batch of art of -- let's be honest here -- uneven, mostly fair-to-middling quality to write about, with the posts tagged blueline, greenline, yellowline, and so forth to make it easy to check them all out in one go and compare and contrast and so forth. That was a fairly well-defined, limited-scope project, but I still occasionally run across stuff I'd missed earlier, or things I couldn't post about because I didn't know the title or the artist.

Another sort of subproject was tracking down additional art by people whose other work I liked, or at least thought was distinctive in some way, and the resulting posts are tagged so if you just want to binge on Manuel Izquierdo art (for example), it's easy to do that. One of the resulting tags is for the late Lee Kelly, the prolific local artist behind Leland One (aka "Rusting Chunks No. 5") and countless other welded steel whatzits that have cropped up across the Northwest since the mid-1960s or so. I've never been a big fan of his stuff, though I'll admit some of his older work truly radiates groovy 1970s-ness, for good or ill. It's more that his stuff is fairly unavoidable if you try to do a public art project in this corner of the world.

That long-winded intro brings us to Icarus at Kittyhawk, at the Beaverton Central MAX station. TriMet's revised Westside Blue Line public art guide describes it thusly:

Icarus at Kittyhawk, 2005, by Lee Kelly was inspired by the myth of Icarus with its timeless message about the danger of human arrogance.

The 10’ tall stainless steel sculpture with seat was purchased with funds left over from the Westside MAX project and held by METRO.

The title is kind of funny given the location: The Beaverton Central project was a late-90s attempt to transplant Pearl District-style urbanism to the 'burbs: Retail and restaurant space on the ground floor, topped with several floors of upscale condos. That, evidently, was the Beaverton version of flying too close to the sun. The initial project ran out of money during construction, and the main condo building sat empty and exposed to the elements for a number of years before finally being completed in the mid-2000s. The condos eventually sold, and they finished an office building or two to flesh out the complex a bit, and a variety of short-lived restaurants and retailers have sort of cycled through the area ever since. But except for a couple of buildings on the old Westgate theater site, the expected forest of ever-taller imitators spreading across downtown Beaverton never happened. Or at least it hasn't happened yet.

Icarus doesn't seem to have arrived with any great fanfare, as the only mention of it I found was in the June 2005 meeting notes from the "Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation", a now-defunct regional government body:

On April 27th, the pedestrian environment at the Round in Beaverton received an injection of culture with the installation of "Icarus at Kittyhawk," a sculpture in stainless steel by Oregon City artist Lee Kelly. TOD Program staff secured funding for the project and worked in partnership with TriMet, the City of Beaverton and regional arts commission on artist solicitation and selection.

As a former westside resident on and off since the mid-1970s, I'm more than happy to snark about Beaverton all day as a private citizen, but the snide remark about Beaverton getting "an injection of culture" in official meeting minutes is... a bit much.

Come to think of it, going by the timing Icarus would have arrived while I was still commuting into downtown from darkest Aloha, since I didn't move downtown and start this weird little blog until November of that year. I don't recall noticing it at the time, but then again I had no idea I would end up doing weird projects like this, so I wasn't keeping detailed notes at the time.

Anyway, Icarus was also a stop on an exhaustive "Walk • Bike • Drive" map of Kelly art across the greater metro area, along with two others just within Beaverton city limits, the others being Arch with Oaks along Sunset, and another at PCC Rock Creek that I've never seen. 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.

Untitled (1978)

Some of you might remember that I used to do a lot of public art posts here a few years ago. That's not really where I'm focused right now, but I still have a few sitting around in drafts, so don't be surprised if a few posts like this one show up among all the semi-rugged outdoor stuff every so often. This time around I've got a few photos (as in exactly three photos) of another Lee Kelly sculpture I stumbled across a while back. This one is fairly small and sits outside the west entrance to St. Vincent Hospital in Portland's West Hills. I was picking someone up at the time, and they were only interested in going home, and I can't exactly ask people to wait while I work out the best camera angles for maximal artsiness, and I'm not up for making special trips and visiting hospitals for the art during a pandemic.

Like a lot of things Kelly made in the 70s, this one simply goes by Untitled. One of the photos clearly shows a date of 1975 on it, and this post originally had 1975 in the title, but a walk/bike/drive tour brochure from the Portland Art Museum's 2010 Kelly exhibititon has a date of 1978 on it. Kelly was in the loop on this retrospective so presumably he would know the right year. Maybe that's the year it sold, versus the year it was made, I dunno. More importantly, there's already a much larger Untitled (1975) of his out there, albeit located in a park in Seattle. Which makes me want to go with 1978 just for the sake of disambiguation. And neither of these should be confused with another Untitled circa 1974, outside a bank branch at NE 72nd & Fremont, or the Untitled (1973) at the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, or the Untitled Fountain that's picked up the name "Kelly Fountain" over time, on downtown Portland's transit mall. That's a lot of Untitleds, and I'm sure I'm just scratching the surface here. But in all fairness, if I was called upon to come up with names for them, I have no idea how I'd go about doing that. Maybe just randomly generate some names, or train a neural net on a bunch of modern art names, and invite people to people read whatever they like into the results, I dunno.

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lee kelly sculpture at salishan

Ok, so here's another post that's been lurking in my Drafts folder for ages. During a summer 2014 trip to the Oregon Coast, I stayed at the groovy 60s hotel at Salishan for a few days, and (though I hadn't planned it this way) got a couple of blog posts out of it. The latter post was about a print on the wall in my hotel room, and in it I mentioned something about the hotel's developer being a big patron of the arts, both at the hotel & elsewhere. Among other things, he was responsible for the ginormous Lee Kelly sculpture along the Willamette river in the Johns Landing area, plus the 60s & 70s-era art all over the hotel grounds. Which brings us to the above photo. The sculpture pictured is in a courtyard outside the hotel's conference center, and as soon as I saw it I thought, hey, wait, I think I know who made that, and (for good or ill) I've tracked down a lot of his stuff over the lifetime of this humble blog. Unfortunately the courtyard was taped off for an event and I couldn't get any closer to it, and ended up with just the one photo.

I figured that would be fine, and I could just Google/Bing/Yahoo/Lycos it when I got home & flesh out the post from there. So I tried that, and... not so much. I found a 1981 Oregonian article about the hotel, which confirmed the thing is a Kelly, and said it went in around 1977... but it didn't mention what it's called. The usual procedure here is that I need to know a name, otherwise I don't have a blog post title, and untitled posts are stuck in Drafts limbo until that little problem gets sorted. But as far as I can tell that one little factoid doesn't exist anywhere on the interwebs. I tried again just now and all I found was someone else's photo of it, from a better angle but again without a name. I suppose I could have just called or emailed the hotel and asked them, like some sort of wild and crazy extrovert (who doesn't mind coming off as a weirdo), but I've come this far in the blog (non-)industry without resorting to, y'know, interacting with people, so why start now? Especially since there's a very good chance it's just called "Untitled" anyway. So this post has sat around in Drafts for close to four years now, which is a bit much. So I'm going to go ahead and declare a statute of limitations on unsolved minor mysteries that nobody else cares about, and post this anyway.

And hey, if you happen to know the answer, the comments are open. I actually just re-enabled anonymous comments as a goodwill gesture for the GDPR era. The new regulations don't actually require that, but I just wanted to emphasize that while Google/Blogspot and Flickr might do tracking stuff with cookies (and I have no control over that), I don't have access to that data and I personally don't track anything or anyone, and have zero interest in doing so. I also don't have or want anyone's email address, phone number, pager, fax, telex, etc., and wouldn't use them if I somehow had them (even if it would help with a blog post title). Hell, I've been known to repeatedly forget the names of coworkers I've worked with for years. I mention all this because my Blogspot dashboard was badgering me to do or say something official about GDPR compliance, so here you go.

Scribner II

For the past year and change, new posts here have been about Portland murals to the near-exclusion of everything else. I think it's gotten a little monotonous, frankly, so I think I'm going to switch gears and work through some of the non-mural stuff I've had lying around for a while. I'd been planning on doing those after I got to zero mural posts in Drafts, but I think I could use a little variety right about now.

The previous big project here (if you remember back that far) involved tracking down public art around the Portland area (specifically excluding murals, at first, on the grounds that there are a whole lot of them around, and more all the time). As part of that project, I made a trip up to the OHSU campus on Marquam Hill, since the state's medical school has a ginormous art collection, including a few outdoor sculptures scattered around here and there.

The example we're looking at this time is Scribner II, a rusty Lee Kelly whatzit from the 70s in his usual chunky style, at a bus stop across the street from the Nursing School. This one reminds me of Kelly's Arlie outside the Portland Art Museum, which looks kind of like Scribner II up on stilts. I couldn't find a lot on the interwebs about this one; it only merited a brief mention in an old Portland Public Art post about OHSU art: "There’s an old rusty Lee Kelly in front of the nursing school, and another shiny one in front of the VA. Both hideous." (The one at the VA Hospital is Aeolian Columns, seen here last April.) That mention wasn't much of a clue, but I eventually located it in Street View, and later tracked it down in person. And here it is, in all its semi-groovy 70s glory. On the plus side, if you're waiting for a bus here and happen to cut or scrape yourself on Scribner II, you can just pop across the street for your tetanus shot. I dunno, maybe the whole reason it's here is to help drive demand for tetanus shots.

The only other mention of this sculpture I've seen anywhere on the net is a vintage photo from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, with Scribner II squatting in a snowy field, and that page contains no further information about the thing. So I can't explain the title, I'm afraid. I imagine it either refers to Charles Scribner II, the 19th Century publishing magnate, or there's a Scribner I lurking out there somewhere.

Aeolian Columns

Here's a photo of Aeolian Columns, a Lee Kelly sculpture in front of the Portland Veterans Hospital at OHSU, in a landscaped median between two buildings. Kelly's website describes it:

Aeolian Columns (1989), stainless steel and porcelain enamel columns fitted with organ pipes, c. 198 inches high; Collection Veterans Administration Medical Center, Portland OR. With composer Michael Stirling.

This is about the same vintage as Kelly's better-known (and similarly musical) Friendship Circle (1990) in Waterfront Park, and the family resemblance is uncanny. Sadly, I have a long track record of bad luck with local musical art, and I have never heard either of these sculptures in action. Or any other musical sculptures in town for that matter, except for the Weather Machine in Pioneer Courthouse Square. I'd claim to have some sort of anti-musical superpower, but in reality it's a combination of the art often being broken, and me being too impatient to wait around for it to do something. Anyway, a 1988 Oregonian article has a bit more about Aeolian Columns:

Oregon City artists Lee Kelly and Michael Stirling have been selected from among 64 contestants to create the $40,000 art-in-architecture project for the new Veterans Administration Medical Center, according to Barry Bell, center director.

The artists have created Aeolian columns, a collaborative sculpture and sound artwork created by sculptor Kelly and composer Stirling. The sculpture consists of three stainless steel columns between 15 and 16 feet in length, with bands of porcelain enamel providing splashes of color and highly reflective material.

The interior of the columns will be fitted with two tuned pipes that will produce the continuous series of tones scored by Stirling. The three pieces will be placed in the parklike setting at the entrance to the center, to create a man-made physical and musical grove.

I actually first heard of this sculpture in a Portland Public Art post about OHSU art that mentioned it briefly; the mysterious 'C' behind the blog was even less of a Kelly fan than I am, and said: "There’s an old rusty Lee Kelly in front of the nursing school, and another shiny one in front of the VA. Both hideous." I wouldn't go quite that far; "eyeroll-inducing" is more like it, and in general I do like Kelly's stainless steel stuff better than his rusty work. More importantly, I just hope the organ pipes play something pleasant and soothing, for the sake of the VA staff and patients.

C & A

I was walking in the West Hills along SW Market St. Drive (yes, it's a street and a drive) when I noticed a pair of familiar-seeming sculptures at the entrance to the swanky Vista House condo complex. I thought, hey, those look like something Lee Kelly might have made. As you might already know, I'm not really a huge fan of his stuff, but it's gotten so I can often recognize it on sight. I went over to take a closer look. On the back, each has the cursive word "Lee". The taller one on the left has the number "90" near the signature (which I assume is the date), and a letter "C" on the base. The other has a "96" near the signature and an "A" on the base. I think then numbers are dates (1990 and 1996, the latter being the year the complex went in). I'm going to guess that the letters are titles, so one is just called "C" and the other "A". I have to guess because I can't find any info anywhere about the sculptures, and I've looked.

While searching for any more info, I ran across a 1996 Randy Gragg column detailing the long, strange history of the Vista House Condominiums. The owners of the land had been proposing various high rise tower designs for this location on and off since 1948, and were repeatedly rejected due to zoning, or neighbor concerns about significant trees. Gragg had high praise for the developer, for barreling through small-minded opposition like a true Fountainhead acolyte. But he didn't like the finished product, going so far as to compare the exterior to low income housing, which is possibly the ultimate insult in his lexicon. He may have been on to something this time, though, because the exterior was that infamous mid-1990s synthetic stucco that caused a national epidemic of black mold and leakage problems. In the mid-2000s the buildings were wrapped in protective tarps for over a year while work crews replaced the buildings' exterior surfaces. It was not a pretty sight.

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.

Omark

On a recent sunny day, I wandered out of the office for a walk down part of the Willamette Greenway Trail. There's a long stretch of trail that begins just south of the South Waterfront area, and continues south beyond the Sellwood Bridge into Powers Marine Park. (The southern end of the trail is closed beyond SW Miles Place right now due to Sellwood Bridge construction.) For much of this distance the trail is bordered by low-rise two and three-story condo and office buildings, generally dating to the 1980s or late 1970s. The tracks for the on-again, off-again Willamette Shore Trolley run parallel to the trail, usually a bit inland but occasionally right next to it. At one point, the trolley tracks are on a raised, curved trestle that looms over the trail, with the boxy brick 5550 Macadam office building right behind it. If you look closely, you can see the tip of some sort of rusty metal object past the trestle and in front of the building. Turns out that object is today's stop on the ongoing public art tour.

The large sculpture in the above photos is Omark, yet another giant Cor-Ten steel thingamajig by Lee Kelly, the guy behind the infamous Leland One; Memory 99 in the North Park Blocks; Arlie at the art museum; Arch with Oaks in Beaverton; and too many others to list. The building here was once the corporate headquarters of Omark Industries, a major manufacturer of chainsaw chains. It seems the company already had a substantial corporate art collection, and when they moved into this new building in 1983-84, they apparently felt a huge abstract sculpture would really jazz up the joint. This particular corporate temple of the arts was short-lived, however, as the company was bought out in November 1984. The sculpture stayed put, obviously, because moving it would be expensive and annoying, but its days as the centerpiece of a major corporate headquarters were over. Since then it's languished in obscurity. Possibly brightening the days of a few office workers, or annoying them for blocking the view of Mt. Hood, and going unnoticed by everyone else. To get a good look at it, you have to take a nearby underpass under the trestle, and go up a flight of stairs to a yard/patio area in front of the building. There isn't a "No Trespassing" sign or anything, much less a gate or any sign of a taser-crazed security force, so I just wandered up and snapped a few quick phone photos.

I actually ran across this one first in the Smithsonian art inventory database. RACC doesn't have it because it wasn't publicly funded and it's outside of downtown. The Smithsonian page merely calls it "(Abstract)", but a page at Kelly's website titles it Omark. (For what it's worth, his Nash, in the Central Eastside district, is also named for the company that commissioned it.) In any case, I imagine he of all people would know what the correct name is supposed to be.

Arch with Oaks

If you live or work in Portland's western suburbs, you've probably driven the Sunset Highway more times than you can count. And at least one of these times, you were probably stuck in traffic next to the giant steel archway next to the eastbound lanes of Sunset, just east of the Cornell/158th exit you probably should have taken to avoid this traffic snarl. If you were really bored, you might have wondered what the deal is with this arch. It's even possible you're stuck in traffic right now and you're googling the arch on your phone. Anyway, today's your lucky day, other than the whole traffic nightmare obviously. This arch is called Arch with Oaks, and it belongs to the surrounding Cornell Oaks Corporate Center business park. It was created in 1986 by Lee Kelly, a prominent local sculptor since time immemorial. There are a lot more works of his around Portland, mostly closer to downtown; I've covered enough of them here that I've added a 'kelly' tag to the posts to keep track of them all. Despite that I wouldn't characterize myself as a fan, for the most part. I'll make an exception for the arch, though. I actually like this one.

The Smithsonian art inventory page for it (the first link) says it's 30' high. Kelly's website says it's either 38' or 48' feet high depending on which page you're looking at. I'm terrible at guessing heights, but the 38' number feels about right.

A September 11th, 1986 Oregonian article about Arch with Oaks explains that the developers opted for a giant arch sculpture instead of a traditional sign as a sign of "quality", to attract a better sort of tenant to their shiny new business park. Plus it was a gift to the community and a symbol for the entire Sunset Corridor. It probably didn't hurt that the arch cost them $100,000 in 1986 dollars, while an ordinary sign was estimated to run around $130,000. Pretty sure everyone loves to talk about quality and aesthetics when it's saving them $30k, roughly the price of a new BMW 3 series back then.

[View Larger Map]

It took a while to figure out how to visit Arch with Oaks. It sits astride a creek in a open area in the business park, north of Greenbrier Parkway next to the FOX 12 TV studios. I came by on a weekend morning, parked in the studio's visitor parking lot, and took a lightly used walking trail over to the arch. It turns out there's actually a "Private Property, No Trespassing" sign right next to the arch to discourage people from standing under it, I guess, although I didn't notice any taser-happy security guards lurking around while I was there. Your mileage may vary, obviously. (Oh, and there's apparently a geocache somewhere nearby, if you're into that sort of thing.)

Oh, and not to be pedantic here, but most of the trees near the arch are willows, not oaks. There are a couple of oak trees next to the office building on the opposite side of the creek, but they aren't a prominent presence around the arch, so the name seems just a little misleading. Maybe there were more oak trees here before this part of the office park was built out. Sort of like the old cliche about subdivisions being named after what they replaced ("Aspen Grove", "Pacific Vista", that sort of thing).

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.

Frank Beach Memorial Fountain

Here's a slideshow of the Frank Beach Memorial Fountain at the Rose Garden in Washington Park. The fountain is a memorial to Frank E. Beach, a prominent local businessman of the early 20th century, who (we're told) invented the Rose Festival and christened Portland the "Rose City". He also developed the Parkrose neighborhood, participated in civic organizations, appeared in the local society pages from time to time, and apparently had a role in preserving the downtown Park Blocks.

Beach died in 1934, after being hit by a car, shortly after exiting the Vista Avenue streetcar. An Oregonian editorial the next day cautioned pedestrians to pay closer attention to traffic and to please look both ways before crossing the street.

The fountain was a gift to the city from Beach's son, Frank L. Beach. The winning design (by the unavoidable Lee Kelly) was unveiled in May 1974, and a groundbreaking ceremony was held at that year's Rose Festival. The completed fountain was officially dedicated at the next year's Rose Festival. In 1977 the younger Beach donated an information kiosk to the Rose Garden. He passed away later that year, and the kiosk was later dedicated to him.

I'm actually not going to go off on yet another gripe-fest about Kelly, the fountain's sculptor. Maybe it's the stainless steel, or maybe it's the reflecting pool, which makes it at least sort of a fountain, as broadly defined. Whatever the reason, this one and the Kelly Fountain downtown can stay. It's still not my favorite style, but I realize this style was considered super-groovy back in the 70s for some reason. So keeping a couple of examples around would make sense, for the sake of art history or something.

Arlie

Today's public art thingamajig is Arlie, yet another whatzit by Lee Kelly, the same guy behind (deep breath) Leland One, the Kelly Fountain, Memory 99, Friendship Circle, Nash, Howard's Way, and a bunch of others. This one's on the grounds of the Portland Art Museum. I don't think I'm going to do posts about every single sculpture outside the art museum, just due to the sheer number of them, but I never pass up a chance to sigh melodramatically and roll my eyes at yet another Kelly creation.

If this post seems snarkier than usual, it's not that Arlie is particularly worse than the others, but that I've already looked at a few too many giant rusty sculptures of his, and this is another one on top of them. This may be sort of unfair in a way, since this one was created back in 1978, and by all rights I should be more exasperated by mid-2000s ones done in basically the same style. It's also reasonable for the reader to go, hey, he's going out of his way to track these down and be annoyed by them. And the reader would be correct. I like to think this occasional quest is at least mildly entertaining. It is to me anyway. And I'll readily admit these things aren't actually a public menace, unless maybe you're standing next to one when an earthquake happens. It's just that, if there's still such a thing as an art historian a few centuries from now, they'll realize how many of these things there are around town and wonder what the hell we were thinking. Assuming post-apocalyptic metal-scavenging mutants don't get to them first.

So, a few links about Arlie, because I care about fairness, and I imagine you might be interested in some less-biased and more informative sources:

• A blog post at 52 Pieces
• An Oregon Arts Commission profile of Kelly
• Artscatter
• A mention in a Portland Public Art post

So on one hand Arlie looks like one of the monstrous alien machines from the Tripods trilogy (a young-adult SF series from the late 1960s), which is not a plus in my book. But one of the legs forms a sort of bench, and I've actually seen people using it occasionally. So it's not beautiful, but it's at least a little useful, so I suppose it has that going for it.

Memory 99

So, the good news is that Portland's getting a new North Park Block, namely the block that currently holds the parking lot for the old Federal Building. The feds have moved out of that building, and it will soon be home to the Pacific Northwest College of Art. They apparently aren't going to need a parking lot, so it's going to be a park instead. And since it's a park next to an art school in Portland, it's inevitably going to sport some public art. The art, in fact, has already arrived, even though the park itself is still just a gleam in city planners' eyes.

So far so good. It turns out, though, that this means we're getting yet another Lee Kelly piece. Kelly, you may recall, is the guy behind Friendship Circle in Waterfront Park, the Kelly Fountain on the transit mall, Howard's Way on West Burnside near the stadium, Nash in the Central Eastside district, and of course Leland One, aka Rusting Chunks No. 5. Longtime readers might recall that I'm not always a huge fan of his work, and I'm not sure the city truly needed quite as many of his pieces as we've ended up with. I'm actually not feeling all that snarky today, though, so I'm going to just set that aside and take the latest piece on its own merits.

Memory 99 arrived at our future park block last October after PNCA purchased it with a grant from the Ford Family Foundation. The same piece was previously seen in 2010 at the Portland Art Museum's show about Kelly's work:

He's a superior sculptor, of course. But there are many around -- Mel Katz comes to mind locally. But when I think of Kelly, I think of that lyrical behemoth greeting visitors, "Memory '99," which Kelly made after public art funding had begun to decline. Kelly paid for the work himself, using computer programs to help design the four structures that resemble twisting, exaggerated musical notes.

That's a telling detail. At the time, Kelly was making vital work, much of which is in this show. But with "Memory '99," he wanted to sum up everything he knew about scale, volume, form and materials, and he wanted to express it in a way that artists stopped doing, either because they didn't have the opportunity or were afraid to.

In other words, Kelly created this chance to prove something to himself. In the 11 years since it was made, "Memory'99" has rested on Kelly's Oregon City estate, surrounded by unkempt grass and shrubs. No one bought it.

Now, the rest of Oregon has a chance to embrace "Memory '99" and other fine, lasting things that Lee Kelly has made.

A 2010 Oregonian profile of Kelly (to go along with the show opening) includes a photo of Memory 99 at Kelly's property in Oregon City. Kelly's website has a larger, similar photo. An article about the show at Art Ltd. discusses Memory 99, describing it as "the monumental Memory 99 (1999), which manages to suggest both gargantuan calligraphy and archeological ruin in its grouping of forms in Cor-Ten steel." The same article also includes a photo of Arlie, another piece of his, which is now on permanent display at the Portland Art Museum. Yes, another one. Sheesh.

Friendship Circle

Some photos of Friendship Circle, the sculpture at the far north end of Portland's Waterfront Park. It's yet another local piece by Lee Kelly, the guy behind Leland One (aka Rusting Chunks No. 5), this time in collaboration with a composer. The sculpture commemorates Portland's longstanding sister city relationship with Sapporo, Japan, and it (supposedly) plays a 35 minute musical piece we're told was inspired by Asian temple music. As far as I can recall I've never actually heard this music, and I've been around the thing more than a few times. So all I can really say is that multiple sources insist it does this from time to time.

If you're looking at it and thinking, jeebus, this is one phallic-looking piece of art, you'll be pleased to know you aren't alone. The blog Culture Shock compiled a list of sorta-suggestive public artworks back in 2009, and this is #2 on the list. Also listed are Pod, aka "Satan's Testicle", Tikitotmoniki from the Pearl District, and Stack Stalk reppin' for the eastside. We've probably acquired a few more of these bad boys since that post went up, given that public art commissions still mostly go to male artists.

nash

So I recently ran across yet another Lee Kelly sculpture here in Portland. Kelly, you may recall, is the guy behind "Rusting Chunks #5", as well as the Kelly Fountain on the transit mall, and the art around "Howard's Way" next to PGE Park, and probably a bunch of others that don't spring to mind immediately.

It's gotten so I can recognize his work immediately, despite generally not being a huge fan of it. This one's called "Nash", and sits in front of the National Builders Hardware store on SE 10th between Yamhill & Taylor, in the Central Eastside industrial area. It's a surprising place to find a big piece of art sitting there, but when I saw it there was just no mistaking what it was. A Portland Tribune article about the store mentions "Nash" briefly: "Portland artist Lee Kelly’s massive steel sculpture of a latch and bolt sits in the front parking lot".

If there's a story behind the sculpture and why it's here, I haven't encountered it yet. But it seems the CEO's late wife was a local patron of the arts, and once served on the board of the Bonnie Bronson Foundation, honoring Kelly's late wife (and co-sculptor of the aforementioned Rusting Chunks). I don't know if that's related, or just illustrates that the Portland art scene is basically a very small town within the city and everyone knows each other. Or at least that was true before hipsters started moving here fresh out of art school. I'm not sure hipsters really count, though, at least not until they've had at least one proper gallery show (i.e. excluding coffee shops, even indie ones).

Howard's Way

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Intro

Some photos of a spot called "Howard's Way", a shiny new park/plaza/whatever located between the shiny new Civic Condos and the Portland Housing Authority's somewhat less shiny but equally new Morrison Apartments.

It's right across the street from PGE Park (home to "Facing the Crowd"), and just a 'block' from Portland Firefighters Park, due east, and not far from TriMet's Civic Plaza.

(Oddly enough, there's another Howard's Way nearby, an obscure city street a few blocks due south, near the 18th & Jefferson MAX station, just downhill from a flight of public stairs. Also, let's not forget the 80's British TV series of the same name (which I admit I'd never heard of before.) )

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The project



Howard's Way and the adjacent buildings replace the distinctive but scary old Civic Apartments, the Portland Housing Authority's previous property on this spot. As far as I can tell, the project was their attempt to cash in on our fair city's late, lamented condo tower bubble. You've got "market rate" (i.e. expensive) condos on one side, low-income public housing on the other, and "Howard's Way" in the middle. The place is the proverbial class divide, given literal, physical form.

I'm of at least two minds about the project. On one hand, nothing gets done in this city unless well-connected developers benefit disproportionately. On the other, the fact that it's not exclusively market-rate condos is above par for the course these days, which is something, I guess.

The theory behind mixed-income development is that locating low income residents along side market rate is that it'll have a beneficial effect on the poor, who will benefit from being around normal, gainfully employed middle-class folks. Possibly it'll rub off, and won't cause resentment.

It's not a new idea by any means. Look at New Columbia, for instance, and the apts. near Union Station. At Union Station there's one subsidized building mixed in with the "market-rate" apartments, and they all look the same. Although the low-income building has apparently become known as the bad part of town, within that development. See also the Pearl Apartments near Jamison Square. And I have to agree it's a better notion than the earlier, classic idea of urban renewal, where you drive everyone out of the area and replace them with a better sort of resident (e.g. Portland's South Auditorium effort back in the 60's), or no residents at all (e.g. Memorial Coliseum). It's a step up from that, at least. Whether it actually works, only time will tell, I guess.

A little history of the site from The Red Electric: Swapping Names on West Burnside.

Although the city was trying to cash in on the condo bubble, results so far have been mixed, though, leading to condo bubble schadenfreude around blogospace.

As you might imagine, the project got a mention on Bojack a few years ago. Unsurprisingly, Jack and friends didn't like the old building here, and they don't like the new one either.

But condo bubble mania may not be the full story, as it turns out. I happened across what is possibly the real underlying reason for the project: The old Civic Apartments were losing all kinds of money:

PORTLAND HOUSING: S&P Lowers Series 1997A Bonds Rating To BB+
-------------------------------------------------------------
Standard & Poor's Ratings Services lowered its rating to 'BB+'
from 'BBB' on Portland Housing Authority, Oregon's housing revenue
senior-lien bonds, series 1997A, issued for the Civic Apartments
project. The outlook is negative. The rating action was based on
the authority's potential long-term deteriorating fiscal and
operating performance.

"The unaudited financial and operating results for Civic
Apartments, based on the year ended March 31, 2004, indicate that
the property continues to underperform," Standard & Poor's credit
analyst Debra Boyd said. "Civic Apartments must achieve both
occupancy and income to maintain the property and to service
debt."

Portland Housing Authority has identified two possible actions to
take over the medium term in response to its fiscal and
operational challenges. It has created a redevelopment plan that
would infuse more than $21.5 million into the project. The
redevelopment project would include a complete renovation of the
existing units, a new parking structure, and construction of
retail space at ground level. The authority indicated that
it ceased leasing efforts on the property in April 2004 in
anticipation of these efforts, which has contributed to the
property's high vacancy rates. If financing for the redevelopment
plan cannot be secured, the authority indicated it will sell the
property.

The bonds are secured by a first mortgage lien on the Civic
Apartments, an older property with 138 units.

The Portland Housing Authority has owned the property since 1997.
The property is run by Income Property Management, which has been
associated with the property since 2001.

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The "park"

Howard's Way is your generic modern public plaza. It's probably "green" and "sustainable" in some way, and it's got a few bits of public art designed not to give offense. We'll get to that shortly.

The planter bit between Burnside & Morrison looks like some sort of groundwater remediation bioswale-ish thing, probably. Bioswales are all the rage, and I'm sure it's a wonderful thing that we have people out there who wet themselves with joy over this sort of thing. I'm not one of them, but still, i guess it can't hurt, maybe. I mean, not unless they dump all sorts of nasty herbicides on the place in the dead of night, to keep the weeds out or something.

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The art





The art's by Lee Kelly, the same guy behind the infamous Rusting Chunks #5 and a number of other pieces around town. I griped at length about his works in a semi-recent post about his "Kelly Fountain", on the once-and-future Transit Mall. As I mentioned there, he's stuck with the same basic chunky style for several decades now, although recently he's taken to welding insipid affirmations to them, I suppose in the hope of making them "mean" something. This time around, we have inane, mild, vapid, and mostly harmless phrases informing us that democracy works (maybe), the common good is good, and community and understanding are also desirable. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

There's a mention of his Howard's Way stuff here, mentioned right after the boneheaded dragon art the PDC tried to inflict on Chinatown.

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Howard Who?
The affirmations on the, uh, art, are quotes from Howard Shapiro, former head of the Housing Authority, in whose honor Howard's Way is named. They're nice, bland, innocuous noble sentiments nobody could possibly disagree with. I hope. I mean, if the public really, seriously, needs to be lectured about the desirability of democracy, society's in a lot more trouble than I thought. In fairness, I don't know what context these were first uttered or written in. They may have been throwaway lines spoken at 6 AM over Belgian waffles, in front of the local Toastmasters group, for all I know. I doubt somehow they were spoken with the idea they'd be enshrined in stainless steel someday.

I'm sure it's all well-intentioned and do-gooding in the classic Portland way and all that, but the place rubs me wrong in a couple of ways. First, I'm not too keen on being lectured by old men who know how everyone ought to live. I suppose it's either that or listen to them prattle on about World War II, but still. Second, it's named after a living person (he merely moved on to 'other challenges' at end of '03), and you know (I hope) how I feel about that.

There's a mini-bio of Mr. Shapiro here (in his role as a trustee for a social-responsibility type mutual fund), and an interview with AARP Magazine.

For what it's worth, I did run across at least one very,
very,
contrarian
opinion about Mr. Shapiro. I can't speak to the merits of that, and I don't really want to get involved either way. Just thought I'd pass it along, in the interest of being "fair and balanced" or whatever.

Since retirement he's been in the news a bit, fighting against the Burnside-Couch couplet proposal, as resident of the ritzy Henry condo tower next to Powells.

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The old Civic Apartments
I don't have a photo of the old Civic Apartments for comparison. They were pretty grim looking, built in 1945 and completely looked like wartime housing, thrown together on a tight schedule and tighter budget. I'm not sad to see them go.

I did run across a small photo in a post on Man Made Lake, plus someone's photos on Flickr, including a few of the demolition, and a couple of interior shots too. It didn't look any nicer on the inside.

A while back, a temporary art installation at the Portland Building reproduced the interior of a typical Civic Apartments unit. I'm not sure what the point of this was.

Couple of articles about project
before
after.

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So anyway, here's the art, affirmations and all:









"the more we know about each other the less we fear"




"democracy works when the least of us have the same advantages as the rest of us"

Ok, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. At least it doesn't say "only works". That would probably count as taking too much of a stand or something.



"good community allows people to do their best"







"what we should strive for is the common good"

Kelly Fountain

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Here are a few photos of Portland's "Kelly Fountain", at 6th & Pine on the once and future transit mall. These were taken back in August, while the fountain was still running. Like most public fountains, the city shuts it off for the winter in case we get a spot of freezing weather (and probably to save money, too). This is kind of hampering the nascent fountain project I recently semi-embarked on. There can't be any new photos of fountains in operation until next spring, so I'm pretty much stuck with whatever I've already got lurking in the archives. It's like the old saying goes, you have to blog with the fountain photos you have, not the fountain photos you wish you had. That may not be exactly how the old saying goes. It's been a long time, or at least it feels like it's been a long time, thankfully.

I put "Kelly Fountain" in quotes because it isn't quite the official name. The water bureau page linked to above says its true name is "Untitled Fountain", one of several untitled fountains here in town. Which is dumb. The Smithsonian's public art inventory has a page about the fountain too, and they insist it's actually called "Anchor". Which is the first time I've ever heard that name. Why is this so complicated?

The "Kelly" in the name is actually the fountain's creator, local sculptor Lee Kelly. He happens to be the auteur behind the notorious Leland 1, or as I always call it, "Rusting Chunks #5". He's the auteur behind a lot of cheesy public art around town, actually -- besides this fountain and the Chunks, there's the fountain up at the rose garden in Washington Park, the tall spindly stainless steel thing in Waterfront Park next to the Steel Bridge, and a few assorted stainless steel bits at the new "Howard's Way" plaza, between a couple of new residential buildings next to PGE Park, as well as smaller gallery works.

As you might have gathered from the last paragraph, I'm not a huge fan of Kelly's work. In fairness, though, the fountain is better than Rusting Chunks #5 in a number of important ways.

1. It's a fountain. The running water helps a lot. Without running water, it's just another big inexplicable hunk of metal looming over the sidewalk. Although that's exactly what it is when the fountain's not running, which is most of the year, actually.
   
2. Stainless steel is always better than rusty steel. This is inarguable. The 70's fondness for rusty metal is yet another example of that decade's pathological aesthetics, just like macrame and blue ruffled tuxedos.
   
3. It's further away from home, so I don't see it all the time. As much as I like fountains, I'd probably tire of this one rather quickly if I had to look at it every day.
   

So, ok, it's not a very long list, and it's kind of a glib list, but my point remains. The fountain's fine, I guess. It can stay, as far as I'm concerned.

Going by the dates on Mr. Kelly's public artworks, it looks like the 70's were his heyday, but his stuff at "Howard's Way" is less than a year old, so clearly he's still got a few eager customers out there. I find it remarkable that, in all this time, he really hasn't changed his style all that significantly. At some point in the late 70's he switched from rusty Cor-Ten steel to stainless, and then recently he started welding inane Zen-esque affirmations to his creations (about which, see this First Thursday post of mine from August '06). That seems to be the sum total of his creative evolution over the last 30 years. Despite that, the local art-world Powers That Be seemingly can't get enough of his stuff. I've never seen the point, really. While trying to get a handle on how this public art racket works, I ran across a few articles about Mr. Kelly. A Willamette Week article mostly fawns over him, but it contains a telling passage:

The type of work he makes belongs to a past not much revered these days. Steel sculpture has gone the way of innocuous corporate decoration. You see it now and again in public parks, plopped there by some now-defunct committee. "Clearly, I'm old hat," muses Kelly. "I don't spend a lot of time thinking about whether I fit in. I'd like to stay around long enough to see how this all pans out. I am curious to see if we'll come back to appreciate some sort of object that's more or less permanent."

An Art in America piece about a 1995 show of his insists that "Kelly's structures radiate an appealing warmth and sense of humor, qualities not usually associated with large-scale metal sculpture". I'm sorry, but I'm just not seeing it. A PNCA profile contains what may be the secret of his success:

When asked what advice he could give to young artists, Kelly jokes, “Maybe I can come up with a half of an advice: If you’re trying to do it as a livelihood, it’s really tough. I’ve just worn the bastards down after all these years.”

As shown in the above photo, there's a sort of low beveled lip around the base of the fountain, I suppose to help keep the water in. It's only a couple of inches, but for some reason skateboarders seem to find it irresistible. I always see skaters hanging out around the fountain, and I just can't figure out the attraction. It seems like they just sort of mill around, as if they all have a gut feeling the fountain's got to be good for something, but they can't work out what it might be. Kind of like the opening bit with the apes in 2001. Occasionally you see someone try out a move, but it's never anything very impressive. Maybe the fountain is the beginners area or something. Beats me. I actually searched to see if I could find any mentions of the fountain in a skate context, but I couldn't find anything on the net. Maybe they call it by a different name or something. On what I'm sure is a completely unrelated note, the RACC's page on public art conservation has a photo of someone removing graffiti from the fountain.

Elsewhere on the interwebs, the Waymarking page for the fountain comes with a bunch of photos. There's at least one photo of the fountain on Picasa, and on Pbase there's a very cool detail shot of part of the thing. But all in all, there's less stuff on the net about it than I would have expected. Which, in all likelihood, means that once this post goes live, if someone searches the net for useful/interesting info about the fountain, they're likely to end up at this humble blog instead. That's the interwebs for you, I guess.