Portland Music Mural

Here are a few photos of the new-ish Portland Music Mural, next to the MAX turnaround on 11th in downtown Portland (and near the RBG mural we looked at recently). Painted by the Pander Brothers, and featuring prominent local musicians past and present, and backed by various movers and shakers in local music, the mural got quite a media blitz when it was created in 2023. Here's an Oregonlive story, one at Willamette Week and one at the Portland Tribune, a KATU story, and probably others I missed in a quick search. Which, ok, that may not seem like much of a media blitz, but it's more than new murals usually get around here.

The worst thing about it has nothing to do with the mural itself. It got a generally positive reception here, so its backers concluded the next logical step would be to rapidly take the concept nationwide, to finally celebrate local music in places like Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, Seattle (ugh), and even Boise, where the local music scene is just cave people hitting rocks with sticks and grunting on the 1 and 3. I dunno, it just reminds me too much of what happens whenever a beloved local business sells out to private equity: First there's an aggressive nationwide expansion, and then the whole thing craters a couple of years later, and after that -- instead of losing their shirts over this -- the private equity dudes just use the loss to cancel out profits elsewhere and end up owing precisely zero dollars and zero cents in taxes again, year after year. I'm not suggesting there are big piles of cash changing hands behind the scenes here; just that taking things nationwide ASAP usually doesn't work out as planned, and it makes me sad to see dumb ideas from Wall Street popping up in the arts.

The best thing about the mural is that the website includes a key to who's on the mural, which you should probably commit to memory in case someone challenges you to Portland's traditional bloodsport, a "You Probably Haven't Heard Of Them" duel. Be aware that merely identifying semi-obscure musicians is not enough to win the duel most of the time, so come prepared with bonus facts and opinions: Be ready to name all of their albums, ordered correctly best-to-worst, and identify which of these albums you own on vinyl. Then explain when and how that artist sold out to The Man (because everyone does eventually) and discuss why their early work up until that point was better. Score even more points for each artist on the mural who is totally overrated and doesn't belong there, and for ranting about exactly who should be up there instead, double points if your opponent hasn't heard of them. Whoever loses the duel has to skip town on the next Greyhound to Boise, while the winner gets to stay, for now. But the price of victory is eternal vigilance; new bands you probably haven't heard of are constantly forming in garages all over town, even while you're asleep, and some might escape detection for a while by not putting out a vinyl EP right away. And inevitably, one of these days, a younger, hipper challenger will say a name that doesn't ring a bell, and it'll turn out to be a 15 year old beatboxer from Hillsboro who also raps in Tamil and has over 10 million TikTok followers, and she's never even touched a music CD or a vinyl record, and has no idea why somebody would want to make one in 2024. Therefore, send not to know for whom the Boise bus rolls; it rolls for thee.

La Lucha Sigue (RBG Mural, SW 11th & Yamhill)

Next up, here's a mural by artist Allison McClay, honoring the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You might recall that she passed away shortly before the 2016 election, and the linked post is dated November 13th, 2020, shortly after the 2020 election, when ol' whatshisname was rummaging through his bag of dirty tricks looking for a way to overturn the election, and everyone wondered just how far he'd really go.

The mural is on the side of a building at SW 11th & Yamhill, next to the MAX turnaround. This half-block is home to a couple of other murals, including City United, Country United (2007), and a recent one honoring Portland music history that I haven't finished the post for yet. This post lingered around in drafts for a while too, but it seemed apropos to post it now: It's been four years since the mural went up, and ol' whatsisname is on the ballot again, and the polls are way too close, and I just deleted a whole paragraph wringing my hands about if and when elderly Supreme Court justices ought to retire, and I already know I'm not going to feel any better about all this after posting this, and I'm pretty sure New Zealand simply doesn't have room for all of us if the worst case scenario plays out. So anyway, 3...2...1... posting...

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.

Inheritance

Next up we've got a few photos of Inheritance, a very large mural by Portland artists Alex Chiu and Jeremy Nichols. This is located on the south side of the new-ish (built 2019) 250 Taylor building, in downtown Portland at, yeah, 250 SW Taylor.

Since it's still a recent building, there are still live pages about it from the architects, construction firm., and property management company, if you're interested. The construction link mentions that the building is built to withstand that 9.0 earthquake geologists keep telling us we're overdue for. Which is a nice feature, given that the building's sole tenant is the local natural gas utility, and The Big One is likely to make a huge mess of their infrastructure, with broken pipes spewing fire and spreading chaos across the region. As opposed to merely contributing to the heat death of the planet, which is what natural gas does when the infrastructure is working as designed.

Because this blog has been around for a while, I can point you at a 2006 blog post here featuring the previous building at this location, the eccentric-looking United Workmen Temple building. We were told at the time that unfortunately the weird old building was too far gone to be salvageable. I'm not the kind of engineer to ask whether that was really true or not, but my office was nearby at the time and we had front row seats to the demolition, and workers had a real struggle on their hands trying to take the core of the building apart, and it took them many months to take the site down to bare dirt before they could start building the new one. This is also the same block that used to be home to the late, lamented Lotus Cafe building, although that half of the block remains vacant as of 2023 while developers wait patiently for the Before Times to return.

Graffiti, SE 8th & Woodward

This photoset is just some graffiti on a midcentury warehouse in industrial SE Portland. It's not part of a wider project, and it also isn't social commentary about anything at all. I just happened to notice it when I was in the right mood and liked the combination of the aggregate texture with the dark grey glossy paint (probably over previous graffiti) and then the purple and hot pink graffiti layered on top of that, and the fact that it got this way thru a completely adversarial series of events. I don't think anyone involved was going for a "look", including whoever added the latest color bits, which are strictly low-end, so-and-so-was-here stuff.

If I've sold you on the look, or at least the idea of it, and you want to go see for yourself, or maybe you think it would appeal to anonymous art collectors and money launderers in Zurich or Dubai, and you're about to send in your jackhammer goon squad, er, street art extraction team, you're probably out of luck. I took these photos months ago and (although I haven't gone back to check) it just stands to reason that it's been painted over at least once since then, with who knows what. And (as far as I know) the technology doesn't exist yet to pick apart all the paint layers to be framed and sold separately, as incredibly lucrative as that would be.

At that point my brain went off on a tangent and dreamed up a Next Generation episode on that theme, and I don't have any more material for this post, so I might as well tell you what it is. Ok, so the Enterprise shows up at the planet of the week, which has two long-warring continents. At one point centuries ago the forces of continent A captured a priceless painting belonging to continent B, and a completely different but equally priceless masterpiece was then painted on top of the original out of pure spite, and it's been a major bone of contention ever since. Picard volunteers to have Geordi separate the two paintings with the transporter, both completely unharmed, which is obviously very delicate work and might involve remodulating the phase inverters or some such. Continent A's national museum curator (a very aggravating person) reluctantly agrees, and it seems to go well at first, but right at the end a transporter accident turns both paintings to piles of dust, or so it appears. A major diplomatic incident ensues, and the locals arrest Geordi or maybe Picard, and a renewed global war looms. Closer investigation reveals a second transporter beam, traced to offworld art thieves in league with the curator, and the crew has to perform an even trickier transporter thing to get both paintings back unharmed, like somehow beaming them out of a sealed cargo hold on a cloaked ship at warp 8, swapping them out for other paintings of exactly equal mass without the subterfuge being detected. Maybe a quick Raiders of the Lost Ark in-joke happens at this point, seeing as they're both Paramount franchises. The crew pulls it off, the thieves' ship is last seen entering Orion Syndicate territory, still unaware of the swap, and everyone else lives happily ever. Right at the end we learn the replacements were a velvet Elvis and a painting of dogs playing poker, both from Riker's personal collection.

Under the Same Sky

Next up we're taking a look at Under the Same Sky, a very large mural in downtown Portland by Canadian^[1] artist Kevin Ledo, whose website describes it briefly: "Under the Same Sky, 50’ x 60’, w/ exterior wall and spray paint, APTart Diversity project, Portland, Oregon, USA | Painted for the ‘awareness and prevention through art’ project, ‘paint outside the lines’". Ledo's website and Instagram obviously cover a lot of other murals besides this one; most are in a similar style^[2], with a sorta-photorealistic portrait or two surrounded by a colorful design, like this recent example in Lynn, MA.

The mural's painted on the side of the historic Bishop's House building at 223 SW Harvey Milk (formerly Stark St.). The building looks extra fancy in front because it was built in 1879 as the official residence of the local Catholic archbishop, though due to a bit of exceptionally poor planning it only served in that role for a couple of years. The cathedral^[3] next door was already being replaced by a larger one up in NW Portland, and when it opened this house was immediately obsolete and the archbishop had to move again. An 1892 panorama of downtown at Vintage Portland shows the Bishop's House sandwiched in between the old cathedral along 3rd and an ordinary 3-story commercial building facing 2nd. The latter building was probably demolished sometime in the 1950s to make room for today's surface parking lot, so that's where the blank wall for the mural came from. Jumping ahead to 2022, the house is now home to the Al-Amir Lebanese restaurant plus various offices upstairs. Some years ago -- and I remember seeing a news item about this at the time but can't find it now -- utility crews discovered underground wires connecting the Bishop's House building with the city's old police headquarters a block north on SW Oak, and the theory was that the wires were an old direct private phone line. It remains a mystery to this day what the line was for and who was calling whom and for what purpose.

Back in the pre-Covid era -- which seems like a billion years ago now -- I once had an office that directly faced this mural for a while. I liked it; it was colorful, and cheerful, and a big improvement over the vast blank wall it replaced. I'm kind of surprised I didn't do a post about it back then, but I suppose it didn't feel like there was any great urgency to it at the time.

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notes

1. Speaking of Canadian things, Ledo recently (2021) did a mural in Sudbury, Ontario in memory of Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, who was born there, and was kind of a big deal across Canada. Here's a CBC article about the mural. I've only been to Sudbury once, back in the mid-1990s, back when the town was most famous for the Inco Superstack, the world's second-highest smokestack (and highest in the Western Hemisphere) at 1250 feet. The superstack was built for what is still the world's largest nickel mine, back when people thought a tall smokestack dispersed toxins well enough that no additional pollution control gear was needed; you could tell you were approaching Sudbury by road because the surrounding forest became increasingly sparse and sickly-looking the closer you got, even before you got your first glimpse of the smokestack itself. The only thing I remember of the city itself was stopping for gas and the attendant saw my license plate and had never heard of Oregon before and had no idea there were states wedged in between California and the US-Canada border. I don't seem to have taken any photos of the place, though, despite how weird it seemed at the time. Anyway the big smokestack has been replaced with a couple of smaller ones and is supposed to be demolished at some point in the near future, so it's fortunate the city now has a new and much less toxic landmark for people to visit.

2.A 2020 GQ Magazine profile of the artist, co-produced with Lexus, argues that Ledo's style exceeds expectations just like the new 2021 Lexus IS does. Over on the youtubes, Doug DeMuro (a well-known auto reviewer with 4.4m subscribers) says it's just 'average', while another guy with 859 subscribers says DeMuro is wrong, which is how debates usually go over there. I have never driven one of these, or any sort of Lexus at all, and have no opinion whatsoever on the matter.

3.The old cathedral was demolished in 1895, not long after the panorama photo I linked to above was taken. A contemporary news item on the demolition said debris from the old building would be used in a new 2 story office building on the site. Which might be the same two story building that's there now. If so, the ground floor was home to the recently-departed and widely missed Cameron's Books, which had been there since the 1930s. For almost as long, the second floor was home to the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant, which was reputedly the worst Chinese place in the whole metro area but somehow stayed in business anyway. A few years ago it morphed into today's "Golden Dragon Exotic Club", keeping the previous name and even inheriting its pile of single-star Yelp reviews. The whole building is pretty decrepit-looking these days and would likely have been torn down for condos or a luxury hotel ages ago if there wasn't a historic structure next door, mid-block in about the most inconvenient place possible. I suppose they could just build around it like the house in "Up", or the similar real-life one on the PSU campus. Long story short: Old building, semi-colorful backstory, draw whatever conclusions you like.

Lotus Cafe Mural

Continuing the theme from the previous post, here's another long-gone Portland mural. This time around it's the one on the back of the Lotus Cafe building, which was demolished in 2018 to make way for yet another generic steel-and-glass (and thus non-mural-able) hotel tower, a late entry in the city's inexplicable late-2010s hotel bubble. The cafe itself closed in 2016 after 92 often-sketchy years in business. It was, believe it or not, a popular and trendy dance club when I was in college in the late 80s and early 90s, despite its location amid government office blocks, far from any other nightlife options. Eventually the place settled down to being a kinda-mundane after-work happy hour spot, popular among people who had settled down into kinda-mundane office jobs nearby, present company included. In fact the photos in this post were taken from my office at the time, looking down at the doomed mural a few days before the rest of the Lotus building came down. Most likely I had fresh coffee with me and had to set it down to take these photos, and it's reasonably likely that I then forgot my coffee and walked back to my cubicle without it. At that point, still needing caffeine, I probably would have made a second, successful coffee run to the break room. Eventually I would have remembered my misplaced coffee and retrieved it, and (if it hadn't been forgotten overnight) possibly checked whether it was still drinkable. Because, after all, it was quite a long walk from my desk to the break room and back, and it's not as if coffee turns into worthless decaf as it gets cold. And this is the point where I sigh loudly and admit I sometimes miss working in an office with other people in it, in case you were wondering how year 2 of the pandemic is going these days.

Google Maps now labels the former Lotus site as the "SW 3rd and Salmon Tower", with an image that appears to be a CGI architectural rendering, not a photo. Somewhat embarrassingly, I do not actually know whether the depicted building currently exists outside of AutoCAD (or whatever architects use these days). I'm sure I've walked past the site sometime within the last six months, and I like to think I would have noticed a brand new 20-story hotel, but I have no recollection of seeing one. So it's possible they haven't gotten around to building it yet, and maybe they never will. On the other hand, the building in that rendering is remarkably boring even by circa-2021 standards, so it's also possible the building is there and I've even seen it in person, but it sort of fades into the background immediately without really registering. I am, in fact, so bored just looking at it that I can't muster any enthusiasm to go for a quick 15 minute walk and double check, though I absolutely agree that would be the responsible thing to do. If it's there, most likely it would just fade into the background again without being noticed, and I would come home still not knowing whether it exists, having been rained on for my trouble, and I'm annoyed just thinking about it.

The old Lotus merited a few pages in Jeff Dwyer's Ghost Hunter's Guide to Portland and the Oregon Coast published in 2015 right around the pop-cultural peaks of both national Portland-mania and of ghost-hunting reality shows. As the story goes, the building's cellar was home to some sort of angry male evil spirit, still nursing a grudge over whatever happened to him back in the Shanghai tunnel era. I have to admit I'm not really a ghost expert, so I have no idea what happens when you tear down an old haunted building and replace it with an utterly sterile new one. Does that free the ghosts or drive them away somehow? Or does a new building just make them even angrier, like the thing in Poltergeist where greedy developers only moved the headstones? I kind of suspect the latter, but again this is not really my bailiwick. So, as always, feel free to chime in down in the comments if you can field this one.

a long-gone mural @ ne 15th & burnside

So a fun thing about losing track of old draft blog posts is that occasionally the subject of the post no longer exists when I circle back to the post again. This happens a lot with murals in Portland; other than a few city-owned ones, there's no expectation they'll stick around for the long term, and usually no budget to touch them up as they age. Some fade away, while others fall prey to vandals, developers, or others located somewhere along the vandal/developer spectrum. Then there are a few spots around town where every so often they just have someone come in and paint a new and different mural over the current one, which is what happened here. Where "here" means one side of the Columbia Art & Drafting Supply building, at NE 15th & Burnside. So the one shown here was painted in 2013 by Portland artist Ashley Montague and was apparently just called "Columbia art mural". And, well, that's all I can really tell you about it, to be honest.

Montague painted a second mural on the same building a few months later that went by "Visual Guardians", which drew a bit more attention at the time, maybe because of the large tiger. It featured in a 2014 r/Portland Reddit thread that in turn links to an Imgur photo of it being painted in late 2013. I somehow got the idea it was called "Beastmaster", thanks to someone else's Flickr photos that I ran across, and did a post about it under that name. So it's about a long-gone mural, under the wrong name, and the embedded "Beastmaster" (1982) movie trailer I included due to the wrong name is now a dead link. Which -- if nothing else -- is an impressive amount of brokenness and wrongness for such a brief post.

A comment on the "Beastmaster" post says the mural had been replaced sometime before November 2016, while current (as of right now) Street View imagery is dated June 2019 and shows what the building's 3 mural spots looked like at that point. If they're on something like a 3 year rotation, they may have cycled through up to 3 new designs since I took the photos here. Which is fine, of course; I'm just mentioning this in case anyone still thinks this little website here is some sort of slick, professional breaking news and current events operation. This may be hard to believe, but we (as in, I) don't even have a single news helicopter. Strange but true.

American Hearts (a.k.a. "Hey! You're Part of It!")

So it turns out I have a few unfinished draft posts about murals left over from when I was doing a lot of those, and coincidentally the couple of posts I'd meant to finish this month are running long and almost certainly won't be done by midnight tomorrow. Which is important because I have this longstanding rule that I need to post something here at least once a month, and I've somehow managed it every month since 2005. So without further ado, here are some photos of the very large mural on one side of inner SE Portland's Redd building. The mural is dominated by the huge multistory words "Hey! You're Part Of It" looming over the viewer, and I started out figuring that was also the title of the thing, but apparently the actual title is American Hearts, I guess as a reproach to the sort of American who insists they are not in fact Part Of It.

This was created by artists David Rice & Zach Yarrington as part of the 2016 Forest for the Trees festival, and I took these photos in June 2017, probably on my way to or from a nearby brewpub, and honestly the whole thing feels like something that happened several lifetimes ago, in a parallel timeline, in a galaxy far, far away, and I don't have the words to convey how much I miss the pre-pandemic Before Times.

Um... so... anyway, elsewhere on interwebs I bumped into photos of the mural at Portland Wild, Simmer Down, Man, and Daniel's Treks, and it figures in blog posts at/by Serendipitous Wonder, Alluvial Farms (one of the small ag businesses that has worked with the Redd's Ecotrust business incubator) and fronttowardenemy.

For whatever it's worth, that last link goes to a post on Steemit, a social media site/app I'd never heard of before which claims to be blockchain-based, somehow, with its own cryptocurrency, somehow; my eyes glazed over partway through their very complicated guide for n00bs. So all I can really tell you is that most of the active users at the moment seem to be in Korea, and there's at least one cat photo there, and honestly the main reason this paragraph exists is to see what happens if I do a blog post containing the words "blockchain" and "cryptocurrency". Maybe I'll be inundated with spam, maybe a bunch of bots will link here and this humble blog will skyrocket up the search result rankings, or possibly skyrocket downward, or maybe we're finally past the initial frenzy around those two particular keywords and nothing at all will happen, who knows.

Getting back to the subject at hand, and speaking of links and search results and so forth, American Hearts is one stop of many on the OregonHikers Field Guide's Portland Street Art Loop Hike, which is based on someone's earlier forum post. Which I guess diversifies their field guide offerings beyond the usual rugged backcountry stuff. I mention this because the hike description cites this here humble blog as a source a couple of times, and it feels like linking back is only fair and probably brings good luck or positive mojo or rad karma or something, and come to think of it I should probably go over the other stops on their tour to see if there's anything I haven't visited. And with that, I'm covered for the month of January, 2021 AD, and I'll see y'all again next month. Unless maybe a fit of extreme inspiration overtakes me tomorrow and I finish another post sometime in the next 29 hours, which seems unlikely.

Whaling Wall, Waikiki

Here are a few photos of Earth Day Hawaii, a 16-story whale mural on the side of a condo tower in Waikiki. This was painted for Earth Day 1995 by artist Robert Wyland, part of his Whaling Walls series of 100 murals painted between 1981 and 2008, including several others on O'ahu and elsewhere around the state. That weirdly comprehensive Wikipedia page notes that this one is #67 of 100, and classifies the murals that no longer exist as "EXTINCT" in all caps, including the short-lived one in Portland (1993-97), which was demolished along with the whole city block it was on to make way for today's Fox Tower. The one in Portland, Maine was at risk from redevelopment around 2014 but has survived so far, while one painted in Mexico City as part of the deal to free Keiko -- the famous orca from Free Willy -- apparently has not. The Waikiki one is only at risk from the hot tropical sun, and the mural was repainted in 2018 so it should be around for a few more decades at least.

fireweed

A mural in downtown Portland on the old Postal Building on SW 3rd, between Washington & Alder, created by Swiss artist Mona Caron. Her page about the mural mentions there's another mural of a different PNW plant in the building's lobby, which I don't have any photos of. As the name suggests, fireweed is one of the first plants to reappear on burned-over land after a forest fire, so we'll be seeing a lot of these next spring.

Questions for Humans: Dreams Wall

Next mural on the ongoing tour is Questions for Humans: Dreams Wall, on an industrial building at SE 10th & Salmon. This was created in 2015 by artist Gary Hirsch, and is one of a series of four Questions for Humans murals scattered around inner SE Portland; we visited Curiosity Wall a while back, so I still have to find Joy Wall and Relationship Wall to complete the set. As with the last wall, I sort of disobeyed the instructions by just taking photos to blog about later (almost a year later, as it turns out), rather than posting a selfie of myself with the mural. Technically speaking the last photo in the photoset includes a reflective RACC sign about the mural, and you can kind of see a silhouette of my hand holding my phone. That's about as much selfie as you're ever likely to see here; it's just not my thing, I guess.

While poking around the RACC site, I realized the artist behind these murals also created Upstream Downtown, the goofy salmon panels on one of downtown Portland's ugly parking garages, which were painted wayyy back in 1992.

The Guardian

Next up, we're taking a look at The Guardian, the big tiger mural on Water Ave. between Yamhill & Belmont, at the east end of the Morrison Bridge. This was created in 2016 by artist Ernesto Maranje, as part of the same project as Under the Same Sky in downtown Portland. The RACC page for the mural describes what it's about, beyond just being a cool tiger:

This mural was created through the AptArt (Awareness & Prevention Through Art) “Paint Outside the Lines” campaign, a multi-wall mural project where trans-global artists are engaging with marginalized groups in the Portland community. Youth from p:ear worked with Ernesto Maranje on this mural with the goal of addressing the reality of growing economic gaps and the impact that divide has on all of society. As the wealth divide in the United States grows, so does the number of people made homeless. The youth painted their identity and things of importance into the shapes of flowers. A larger than life tiger stands guard above the flowers, protecting them as they develop and grow in a dreamy world. Next to the tiger a bird takes flight representing the potential all humans have when nurtured and protected. Elements of coral and sea life adorn the tiger, bird and flowers, highlighting the connection we all share regardless of where we come from or where we are going.

Under the Same Sky

Next up, we're looking at Under the Same Sky, a huge mural at SW 2nd & Stark, created in 2016 by artist Kevin Ledo with help from a local refugee & immigrant youth organization. The RACC page for it includes a short description:

This mural was created through the AptArt (Awareness & Prevention Through Art) “Paint Outside the Lines” campaign, a multi-wall mural project where trans-global artists are engaging with marginalized groups in the Portland community. Students from David Douglas High School and R.I.S.E. (Refugee & Immigrant Student Empowerment) worked with artist Kevin Ledo to create stencils and words in Arabic, Swahili, English and Somali about belonging and diversity that were applied to the mural.

Since its founding six years ago, AptArt has facilitated workshops and collaborative murals with communities living in conflict-affected areas, including Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Jordan. Portland is the first U.S. city to be a part of this effort. Artists Kevin Ledo, Ernesto Maranje, and Ruben Sanchez are painting murals at four sites in Downtown Portland and the Central Eastside Industrial District as part of the program, which takes place in 2016 and 2017.

Lucky Lab mural

A little mural inside the Lucky Lab brewpub on NW Quimby, with an arrow pointing toward the restrooms. I don't usually do indoor murals, but this one contained dogs and hops, plus I was headed to the restroom anyway, so I figured I might as well take a couple of photos. The hashtag above the signature in a few of the photos points to the creator's IG profile & website, minus the hash symbol obviously.

Arts Base murals

Here's are a few photos of the Arts Base murals on a former upholstery store at N. Williams Ave. & Wygant, as seen back in December 2014 when I took these photos and promptly forgot about them in the Drafts folder. A 2011 Portland Street Art piece explains that a group of artists & local residents rented the abandoned store, covered the outside in murals, and converted the inside to studio space. City Hall, on its usual quest to seek and destroy all unpermitted fun, declared the murals to be graffiti and ordered them painted over. Eventually the city relented somewhat and agreed the murals could stay, but the artists & their studios in the building had to go, because zoning. So the end result was a brightly painted and now re-abandoned building, at least as of December 2014 when I stopped by. Through the magic of Google Street View, I see that the same murals were still there in November 2015, but by June 2016 they'd been replaced by a much more sedate -- even tasteful -- yellow and grey geometric pattern. I can't help but think the swanky new townhouses across the street had something to do with the murals being toned down.

She Flies With Her Own Wings

The next mural we're visiting as part of our ongoing project is She Flies With Her Own Wings, in the Alameda neighborhood at NE Regents Dr., Ridgewood Dr., & Alameda St. This is another one with an RACC description:

The inspiration for this mural comes from the Oregon state motto—”She Flies With Her Own Wings”—and displays the state bird, insect, flower, tree, and fruit. The creation of the mural involved the participation of nearby kindergartners, their teachers and parents, and neighborhood volunteers.

I have gotten the distinct impression that every weird blog project of mine eventually requires a trip to Alameda. First there were a bunch of tiny not-quite-parks to visit, thanks to the neighborhood's winding streets and tangled intersections. Then there were some public stairs that needed a visit, which I didn't visit the first time because I wasn't doing stairs then. And now there's a mural, which I didn't visit the previous two times because I wasn't doing murals then. As far as I can recall, I think these are the only times I've been in the Alameda area in years, so if you happen to run into me there, it probably means the neighborhood has painted a local intersection, or they've somehow gotten themselves a new bridge or something.

I think I've said before that I don't claim to be a journalist, nor have I ever been accused of journalism. While I was taking these photos, a woman jogged by, saw I was taking photos, and told me she'd worked on painting the mural. A real journalist would have seen this as a great interview opportunity. I just said something to the effect of "Oh cool, I like it.", and she smiled and kept jogging. A real journalist would have headed back to the office, filed a Pulitzer-worthy story just before deadline, and headed off to a nearby dive bar where the bartender calls everyone "pal" or "mac". I created a draft post and then forgot about it for close to a year and a half, and the closest thing I'll ever have to an interview here is being recounted from memory. In short, if you're looking for examples of the groundbreaking internet journalism of the future, this is not the place to look, and I'm not the person to ask.

"History of Land Use in Hillsdale"

The next installment in this humble blog's ongoing mural project is History of Land Use in Hillsdale, at a bus stop at the busy intersection of SW Terwilliger & Capitol Highway. Its RACC blurb:

The artists Angelina Marino and Joel Heidel enlisted the help of over 120 community members to develop the concept for this mural which addresses historical and cultural aspects of the area. The site is located on Capitol Highway at a transition point where forest met with what was once dairy and orchard land. In a stylized manner, the content considers land use from the days of the settlers who established the dairies to the current day results of the Terwilliger Parkway reforestation. It speaks of cultural diversity by use of colorization and the bells on the cows that, by shape or content, represent the diversity of residents, both historically and according to the current census. The plants used in the mural also tie decades and cultures together, including domestic flowering and fruit trees mixed with indigenous forest plants.

This one was tough to get photos of. It's usually viewed -- briefly -- from a moving vehicle. I finally managed to take a couple of photos once when I was stopped at the light, but it was around dusk and the photos came out poorly. My usual approach in recent years has been to do the blog post anyway while making self-deprecating remarks about the subpar photos, but I had to draw the line somewhere. A few weeks ago I went for a hike in Marquam Nature Park, with no particular destination in mind. I ended up walking south along Terwilliger, and it occurred to me I could continue on to the Capitol Highway intersection & then catch a bus to the Sasquatch brewpub in Hillsdale for lunch (Capitol Highway lacks sidewalks, so walking the rest of the way would've been a poor idea.) Then I remembered this mural was at the bus stop, so I could indulge this occasional weird blog project while I was at it. So a plan took shape, and here we are. I suppose it would have been simpler to just take a bus to the bus stop, take some photos, and then get back on the next bus, but this way it was part of a nice walk with beer and a burger at the end.

Alleyway Street Art Project

Next up we're visiting the Alleyway Street Art Project, a collection of murals in the NE Williams Ave. - Cleveland Ave. Alley between Jarret St. & Jessup St., if those directions make any sense. I don't know the backstory about why this one alley in a residential neighborhood has a bunch of murals. I suppose everyone involved just agreed to do it and didn't need or bother to post anything about it on the interwebs. I did run across someone's blog post with a few of the murals here taken at night, for what it's worth.

Belmont Rotating Mural

Next mural up is the Belmont Rotating Mural, which is basically the garage of someone's house on SE Belmont near 32nd which gets repainted by different mural artists every so often. These are rather old photos and I'm positive it doesn't look like this anymore. The PDX Street Art page (1st link) has a few photos of it as it's changed over time.