Monkey, New Columbia

Next up in the ongoing public art thing, we're looking at a kinda-disturbing monkey statue located outside the New Columbia Apartments complex, across the street from McCoy Park in North Portland. This was created by Nigerian-born artist Mufu Ahmed, who also did the squirrel and salmon park benches over in the park. I really liked those, so maybe my issue with this one is that monkeys are inherently kind of disturbing. The internet says this is one of three Ahmed animal statues at the apartment complex, the others being a heron and a lizard, possibly gecko, or maybe a chameleon. I'm going to go with chameleon, based solely on the fact that it's located just steps away from the monkey and I apparently walked right past it without noticing.

This post was stuck in Drafts for years because I didn't have the info in the last paragraph (including, frankly, what it's supposed to be; I was thinking it was some kind of unholy hybrid, possibly a greyhound with a human face). Repeated internet searches over time failed to return any useful results, and I had largely given up on solving this one. But the search engine gods were off their game recently and allowed an actually useful result to sneak into the first dozen pages or so of ads and irrelevant results and general spam. It turns out the info I was looking for has been out there on the internet this entire time, in a 2006 post on the old Portland Public Art blog. Said blog has been "on hiatus" since 2009 and somehow, every now and then, it still turns out to have the answers I'm looking for when nobody else does. I don't know anything at all about the mysterious "C" behind the blog, but I hope they're enjoying their extended hiatus and are out living their best life.

On that note I should probably say something about the other art you can see if you make the trek to McCoy Park to gawk at the weird monkey statue. Across the street to the west, McCoy Park is home to a kid-friendly fountain, along with the aforementioned benches, a moon-n-stars inlay in the sidewalk, and an art fence around the park's community garden.

The community center across the street to the south also has some art to look at, like Green Silver on the roof of the building. The RACC website says there's more stuff to see inside, which I didn't know at the time, so that's left as an exercise for the reader, I guess.

One thing you won't see here is Ancestor Tree, a ginormous thingamabob made from the roots of a tree that was torn out for the New Columbia project. It was dedicated in 2005, and spent the next few years weirding people out while also beginning to rot subtly. By 2012 it was already so far gone that they decided to just tear it out on safety grounds. There was talk of replacing it for a while, but it's been over a decade now that hasn't happened yet, probably for budgetary reasons. Which is ironic given that tree roots technically do grow on trees. But hey, what do I know...

Community Garden Fence, McCoy Park

Ok, next up on our temporarily(?)-revived public art thing, here are some photos of the Community Garden Fence at McCoy Park, created by artist Suzanne Lee. The brief RACC description:

The New Community Garden Fence panels mark each of the four entries to the garden and represent different areas of the world. The images of food and plants along with their quotations offer visual and cultural references which reflect both the similarities and differences between cultures.

As you might've guessed, this is another post that sat around as a forgotten draft since 2014, shortly after I took the photos here. So the standard disclaimer applies: Old photos mean it may or may not look like this now, your mileage may vary, no refunds. The last photo in the set is from a distance to show more of the fence in context, which is the only photo I took of the garden itself. Which is a little odd since I had an occasional "take photos of community gardens" project going at the time, but I always tend to do this, going full tunnel vision on one particular topic for a while and not noticing the mural I walked past on my way to look at an obscure bridge, and a month later not noticing an obscure bridge on my way to an especially interesting waterfall, or not attending to the growing stack of real life to-do items that pile up while chasing this stuff. I do really enjoy chasing rabbit holes all the way down, but I can't pretend there isn't a downside to being like this.

This was originally supposed to be the third of four public art posts set in or near the same park; the fourth would have been about Ancestor Tree, a very large conceptual art thing that was meant to be a centerpiece of the park. It was a chunk of a huge London plane tree that had been cut down during the New Columbia rebuild, trimmed and flipped upside down so it looked like a tree stump balancing on the tips of its roots. I was not a big fan of it based on photos I'd seen, and snarking about it might have been fun. But apparently the ex-tree was no match for the elements in its new form, and it began to rot not long after installation. So the city removed it in 2012, before I got around to stopping by for photos. The article talks about maybe finding some sort of replacement art to take its place, but I gather this never happened and the site remains an open grassy field instead, which is a perfectly fine thing to have in a city park.

The article doesn't say what happened to the semi-rotten art afterward. They probably just woodchipped it, but sometimes it's easier, from a bureaucratic standpoint, to just ship things off to an obscure warehouse to be forgotten in long-term storage, like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So who knows. It would be weird and unsettling to run across it lurking in a shadowy corner of a vast, dimly lit warehouse, but I guess that's still better than being stuck with a warehouse full of unwanted Confederate statues like a lot of cities in this country. So there's that, I guess.

Moons and Stars, McCoy Park

Next up, here are a few photos of Moons & Stars, another public art piece at McCoy Park, taken on the same visit as the previous post (as in, these photos are from 2014, and things might have changed since then). This one was created by by Hong Kong-born Portland artist Horatio Hung-Yan Law, and its RACC page includes a brief description:

The moon’s phases are represented by the granite disks found embedded in the pavement. Various cultural ideas about the cycle of life are captured in the quotations, proverbs, folk sayings and myths you’ll find etched in the disks.

Squirrel/Salmon Benches, McCoy Park

November seems to be a designated month for people to do ambitious projects: Writing a novel in 30 days; growing a luxurious handlebar mustache in 30 days to raise prostate awareness, and other worthy causes. I'm not feeling anywhere near that ambitious, but it occurred to me that my infamous drafts folder is a mix of recent hiking & outdoor posts that lately seem to take forever to finish, and a smaller set of public art and city park posts from a few years ago that I never quite finished for various reasons and kind of forgot about. So I thought I might switch gears and start at the back of the drafts folder and see how many of those I can finish this month. Unless I get chosen for jury duty later this month, in which case all bets are off.

So the first thing we're looking at this month is "Squirrel/Salmon Benches", a couple of cute circa-2005 park benches in North Portland's McCoy Park. The second link, which goes to the freshly-redesigned-again RACC public art database -- has this to say about it:

The squirrel & salmon benches were designed to reflect Northwest wildlife. Mufu Ahmed is a Nigerian poet, sculptor and textile artist who combines the imagery, traditions and stories of his Yoruba culture with the techniques, materials and applications of the Western world.

I really like the squirrel design, and the salmon one is fine as far as salmon art goes, although it's a heavily overused theme in this part of the world. At one point I started tagging posts about salmon art with "Heroic Salmon", as the fish are usually depicted bravely struggling back to their streams of origin to spawn and promptly drop dead. An inspiring life story from which the public is meant to draw important life lessons, I guess. Or maybe I'm reading too much into that. Anyway, the really striking thing about the benches, and a big clue that they're from 2005 and not 2021, is what's not there: No metal bar down the middle to keep people from sleeping there, no spiky bits to make it unpleasant to sit on, no electrified razor wire or whatever the latest anti-homeless technology is. They're just plain old park benches, which are rapidly becoming about as common as pay phones. The big asterisk here is that these are not recent photos, and for all I know the city could have built a piranha-filled moat around the benches by now. Your mileage may vary widely, in other words.

Oddly enough, one of the other recipients of the aforementioned "Heroic Salmon" tag (and subject of a 2012 post here) is a fountain inside a parking garage at the Lloyd Center mall. And in a weird coincidence, the entire mall is being repossessed as of this week, and the would-be repossessor says they plan to demolish the mall and put in offices and housing instead, and the Lloyd District will eventually look just like every other gentrified part of town, with identical buildings sporting the same hip local chain stores and restaurants. I mean, I realize the shopping mall era is over, and this particular mall's been declining for years now, and a vast shopping mall just across the river from downtown was always a an awkward fit, and an open-air mall was never a good idea in this climate. And even after its 1990s revival slash heyday it was never actually 'cool', because it was still a shopping mall. And a mall with awful timing, too; in the 90s renovation the owners managed to rip out or conceal all of the mall's original Midcentury character, just before that look became cool again, and now the mall's goofy 1990 postmodern stuff is about to meet the same fate, probably just before that look becomes cool again. All of that said, I do have fond memories about the place during that particular time period, though, I will actually be sad to see it go. It's hard to explain.

The park here is actually the result of another demolish-replace-and-gentrify effort, this one from a late 90s/early 2000s effort to replace the city's most notorious public housing project with a twee suburb. But we'll get into that when I finish the post about the park itself. Which might happen this month? Or if not this month, soon at least. Ideally.

McCoy Fountain

Here are a couple of video clips of the fountain in North Portland's McCoy Park, near the corner of Trenton St. & Newman Avenue, once again showing why I won't be winning any Oscars anytime soon. It's your basic fun-for-the-kids water jet fountain, which is an increasingly popular thing now that the state health authorities frown on public wading pools. A fountain guide from the Parks Bureau (which took over the city's fountains from the Water Bureau a few years ago) has a brief description of it:

Built in 2006, McCoy Fountain was designed by Murase Associates. It is the first decorative municipal fountain in north Portland. The playful water feature sits at the south end of McCoy Park in the New Columbia neighborhood. The Housing Authority of Portland, master developer of New Columbia and McCoy Park, commissioned the fountain for people of all ages to enjoy. McCoy Fountain is located across from housing for seniors and adjacent to the neighborhood grocery store and coffee house.

It recirculates nearly 8,000 gallons of water. Water spouts at random intervals at heights of up to 6 feet from 35 jets. It's a "guessing" fountain - people guess which spouts will erupt next in the 710-sq-ft oval area bounded by seating ledges.

Green Silver

Couple of photos of Green Silver, an art installation on a rooftop corner of the Trenton Terrace Senior Center, across the street from North Portland's McCoy Park. The description from its RACC page:

A double-row of aluminum panels depicting Northwest evergreen forests are illuminated with LCD color lighting between panels and that sits on top the NE corner tower of the building, facing the adjacent park. The lighting color is programmed to reflect different seasons and holidays. The lighted sculpture creates an aerial landmark for the building both day and night, and pays tribute to the resilience of the senior residents at the former housing project.

Sadly I only have daylight photos of it, so we're not getting the full effect, but both the RACC page and the artist's website have nighttime photos so you can see what it looks like then. His website notes that he also created Spiral Path with Moon and Stars, the moon-and-star designs scattered around the park, as well as Glass Leaves inside the senior center.

So that's about all I know about this one, as there isn't much on the net about it. It doesn't even have a proper RACC page; the page I linked to above is a portfolio page for artists pre-approved to work on new RACC projects. I'm not really sure what the criteria are for something to merit a full database entry vs. just being a portfolio item. I'm mildly curious, but it's probably a very boring reason relating to ownership or funding sources or something along those lines.