Montgomery Pride

In a post back in January I mentioned something about there being another City Repair street mural on a closed section of SW Montgomery St., on the Portland State campus, which I was bound to do a post about sooner or later. So here are a few photos of Montgomery Pride, on the block of Montgomery between 6th & Broadway. The blurb for it on the City Repair project map describes it as "a design pattern that celebrates LGBTQ Pride, the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and Marsha P. Johnson" and the 2019 painting of it as "an event that would bring together the LGBTQ community, Urban Planning community, and the PSU community to turn an unattractive street into an enriching temporary public event space."

The street closure happened as part of the university's major renovations to the business school building next door. The business school was the newest and swankiest building on campus when I was a student circa 1990 -- a student environmental group I was involved with tried to schedule meetings there, strictly for the nice cushy chairs -- but it couldn't compete with the new engineering school buildings, facilities-wise, and that simply wouldn't do. But there's always donor money available for re-swank-ifying business schools, and the one at PSU has reclaimed its rightful place as the newest, shiniest, swankiest, most blindingly metallic edifice on campus. Across Montgomery, for contrast, is the brutalist University Services Building, built in 1970 and seemingly unchanged since then (except for some late-2000s public art on the east side of the building).

"Brick Relief", PSU

Next up on our public art tour is Brick Relief by Jacques Overhoff, just inside the 6th & Harrison entrance to the Portland State University business school building, which is currently undergoing a major remodel and expansion. Its Oregon Arts Commission page includes a brief description: Stylized and patterned alterations to conventional bricks integrate into a wall of otherwise conventional bricks. Although you could probably tell that much just by the photos. (The chair in the photos is not part of the art, though I couldn't blame you for wondering.) PSU's art inventory mentions it & says it dates to 1986-87, which would have to be when the building went in, given that it's part of the building. The state archives website also has a series of photos of the relief being assembled, unless it's a different brick relief in Corvallis by the same artist. That part isn't entirely clear.

PSU Art Annex mural

Next up is a mural on the back of Portland State's Art Annex building, facing 4th Avenue near Lincoln. There doesn't seem to be anything about this one on the interwebs, unfortunately; the temporary art for the MAX Orange Line opening included a mural, but it was a different one located in the vacant lot behind the main art building.

Decker

The ongoing public art tour takes us back to the Portland State campus yet again. This time we're taking a look at Decker, the large ceramic wall sculpture at the entrance to PSU's Millar Library. It was created by Geoffrey Pagen for the library's early 1990s expansion. The Public Art Archive description (which I doubt is an artist statement, given that the author wasn't sure if it's ceramic or not):

This piece is comprised of rectangular sections of flat, perhaps ceramic material that has been painted in deep blue, red, turquoise, and black. A pattern seems to emerge from their painted surfaces. Pieces vary in height, and they are arranged in such a way that they resemble a xylophone that stretches a significant length down the curved wall upon which they are mounted.

On a semi-related note, I probably ought to stop thinking of the expansion as the "new" part of the library. It was under construction while I was in school (and the existing library was loud and kind of dusty as a result), but at this point it's older than most of the students studying there. So "new" is probably not the right word anymore.

Levitated Light

The next stop in the ongoing public art project takes us back to Portland State University campus, this time to the 1980s-era business school building, where Levitated Light hangs in the large atrium facing SW 6th Ave. It's visible from outside, and I just sort of assumed it was a fancy chandelier. Although as you can see here, the lights are actually mounted in the atrium ceiling, and it's not a chandelier at all. It turns out this is a large sculpture by Dale Eldred, who I gather was quite a well-known artist. This is the part where I explain once again that I'm not really an art critic or much of an expert, and my unfamiliarity with his work is not an interesting data point.

I haven't figured out how PSU ended up with a large (but very obscure) sculpture by an apparently famous artist. The Oregonian apparently never reported on in when it went in, nor have any of the paper's art critics mentioned it in the decades since then. So... I dunno. It did show up in someone's interesting list of Portland-area glass art. (I say "interesting" because I may want to track down a few of the other entries on the list at some point.)

Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel

Here are a few photos of Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel, an art wall in the basement of Portland State's Student Rec Center. The brief and rather unhelpful RACC description:

This is a conceptual drawing utilizing visual elements of the surrounding neighborhood and abstracting them into unusual forms. The piece comments on the development of architectural concepts in relation to modularity, transparency, multi-valence, and asymmetry.

When the rec center opened in 2011, PR about the new art in the building focused primarily on Intellectual Ecosystem, the building's video art installation. That sort of makes sense, since permanent video art is pretty rare in Portland, but the press release also briefly mentions "a cut and painted steel work 'Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel', by Damien Gilley, installed in the auditorium lobby.". The artist's website merely offers a photo of it, without further explanation.

PDX Pipeline interviewed Gilley in 2010, and this piece got a brief mention there:

Your public art piece, ”Incomplete Field Guide for Time Travel”, was recently unveiled at PSU. What wit like to move from an ephemeral installation to a permanent, commissioned framework?

My approach remained simple similar to my temporary projects. I used simple materials (aluminum, auto paint, wood) that translate well in a line art, graphic look. But because I have been a graphic designer and know the process of using digital files to output hard materials, it was the same process of translating the digital into physical, a very predictable result.

Intellectual Ecosystem

Here's a short YouTube clip of Intellectual Ecosystem, a video art installation on an outside wall of the Portland State Student Rec Center building, facing the Urban Plaza. The university's PR describes it as:

...a video work that uses imagery of PSU student performances, faculty work, and archival holdings that were researched and filmed over a one year period.  Nearly forty faculty members and student groups were engaged by the artists.  
...
“Intellectual Ecosystem” contains a total of 160 minutes of original video content, projected in a custom programmed sequence to remix the clips.  The work is viewable from inside the ASRC and also animates the busy Urban Plaza from a 12’ x 16’ transparent holographic screen that, even when the projector is active, allows the activities of students inside the building to become another layer of the composition.  The title of the work is inspired by PSU Environmental Studies Professor John Reuter, who has called for the creation of new metaphors and the identification of characteristic patterns to allow people to grasp the immensity of natural processes.  

The installation was created in 2010 by artists Fernanda D’Agostino and Valerie Otani; you might recognize both names from other Portland public art projects that have appeared here previously. D'Agostino created Urban Hydrology and Patterns May be an Action, or the Trace Left by an Action along the MAX line at PSU, Icons of Transformation at North Portland's Overlook MAX stop

Otani created Voices of Remembrance and Prowform & Propform along the Yellow Line, Money Tree at the SE Powell Green Line station, and Folly Bollards at the downtown Peforming Arts Center, I mean, "Portland'5 Centers for the Arts". (Yes, that's an apostrophe-five, and it's there on purpose. It's a terminally silly name, and some marketing consultant probably made a ton of money thinking of it.) The two artists collaborated on the Flows and Eddies sculptures around the Smith & Bybee Wetlands nature area.

PSU Urban Plaza Fountains

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Here are a few photos of the trio of fountains in the PSU Urban Plaza, on the Portland State campus at SW 5th & Montgomery. Two of the three fountains are sort of tilted aqueduct structures, with water flowing off of both the low and high ends. Water runs down to the low ends and then off, and the design suggests to the viewer that water also flows flows uphill and off the high end as well. Obviously that's not what's actually going on, but at a casual glance it kind of looks that way. The planters next to the fountains are a later circa-2011 addition, part of the city's endless handwringing about stormwater management.

A 2010 PSU Vanguard article questioned whether all the fountains around the campus were really worth the expense. (The others include Farewell to Orpheus on the Park Blocks, and the tiny one outside the Student Health Center.) Apparently the Urban Plaza fountains are prone to leaks and mechanical breakdowns, and the university's fountains cost as much as $300,000 per fountain per year to maintain. (This is on top of the initial construction costs; the marble for the fountain alone ran around $400k).

The fountains were officially renamed in 2012 in honor of the late Joyce N. Furman, a local philanthropist who had given generously to the university over the years. Or at least one of the three fountains was renamed; I wasn't sure the name applies to all three, so I went with the older generic name as a post title. The sign in the plaza says "fountain", singular, so it's possible the other two are being reserved for equally generous future donors. It would be unlike PSU to pass up a naming rights opportunity like that.

The Cheerful Tortoise Mural

The ongoing mural tour takes us to the Portland State campus again. Our last visit here (muralwise) took us to The Knowledge, a photorealistic piece celebrating the university library. Today's installment is a bit different: A few years ago the Cheerful Tortoise college/sports bar (which has been there as long as anyone can remember) was brightened up with a sports-themed mural that wraps around the building. Like many of the others we've visited lately, it's part of the city's kinda-public mural program, so it's legally public art, with an RACC database entry and everything. The RACC description is fairly brief:

The three mural images depict a variety of Northwest regional sports, united by color, texture and background. The murals depict portraits of Hall of Fame members from the Northwest, college athletes including Bill Walton and Steve Prefontaine, and the Portland State University mascot and other related university images.

The Tortoise was there when I was a student, circa 1990, and as I (vaguely) recall it hasn't changed since then, other than obvious things like flat screen TVs and a modern craft beer selection. It's possible they've changed the deep fryer oil at some point since 1990, but I wouldn't bet on it. We occasionally stop there for breakfast, since nothing pairs with bacon and eggs like a nice IPA. Trust me on this. At night it's a different story; we were dragged there by friends one time, and it was red Solo cups, Jager bombs, people going "woooo", etc., which is great if you're 22, or maybe 28 or so if you're still in grad school. Now, not so much. It's never a good idea to be the oldest person at the party, so we didn't stay long.

The mural got me wondering just how old the Tortoise is. The first time it shows up in the Oregonian is December 1961; apparently they sponsored a city-league amateur basketball team at the time, which defeated Nobby's 80-49, if I'm reading the score correctly. In any case, PSU has only been at its downtown location since the early 1950s, so the bar's been there almost as long as the university itself.

Viking Creation Myth

Today's public art object is Viking Creation Myth, a large glass light fixture in Portland State University's new Student Rec Center. The university's public art brochure describes it:

Vibeke Skov, 2007 The Creation Myth is a unique artwork of kiln formed glass and iron in the form of a Viking ship. Pictographic compositions are set against symmetrical glass panels within the iron frame of the ship.

Skov is a well-known Danish glass artist. Here's an interview (with English subtitles) I found over on YouTube:

The reason behind all of this Viking business is that the university's sports teams are the PSU Vikings, so a Viking theme is sort of inevitable. The name dates back to the school's humble origin as the "Vanport Extension Center", offering G.I. Bill classes to returned WWII veterans. At that point they were the "Vanport Vikings". As far as I know, the name was chosen just for the alliteration. The school decided to keep the nickname in 1952 when it became Portland State and moved to the South Park Blocks.

The Student Rec Center offers surprisingly cheap gym memberships for alumni, which is the real reason I was there. I used to belong to the gym at Duniway Park, which began as a YMCA and went through a series of increasingly shady owners before it finally closed last summer, or was evicted, depending on who you ask. I think that legal saga is still ongoing, actually, though I lost interest after I got them to stop charging me for membership in a defunct club. Finding a replacement gym was annoying, since I don't like being called "bro", and I don't want to buy anyone's stupid protein shakes, and I've gone this long without ever having a conversation about "ripped glutes" (which sounds really awful) and I don't want to start now. Fortunately the PSU gym is pretty low key, and since the school serves a lot of "nontraditional" students I don't really stand out as an "old person", at least as far as I can tell. So that's good.

PSU Secret Putting Green

Today's secret Portland spot is a weird one. The Portland State campus is home to a tiny putting green, at the west end of SW College Street, tucked away behind some research greenhouses. It's next to the Peter Stott Center, a university athletic facility, but the university's guide to the place doesn't mention anything about a putting green. Which makes sense, I mean, I'm not a golfer or anything, but it doesn't exactly look like a world-class facility. It's astroturf, for one thing, and there were weeds growing up through the hole when I looked at it, which would never fly at Augusta National. The scenery isn't much either: Greenhouses, a blank brick wall of the Stott Center, and I-405 traffic right next door.

A 2002 PSU Vanguard column describes the writer's love for the putting green, not for the golf, but for the seclusion:

The Putting Green may be filled with the sound of traffic and annoying insects, but I have never actually had to get out of the way of someone golfing there, or doing anything else for that matter. It sits just south of Stott Center, and boasts a lovely view of two or three highways. I would not hang out there too late at night if I cared about my personal well being, but if I cared about my personal well being, I wouldn’t have enrolled in summer session in the first place. Regardless, when I sit at the Putting Green, no one asks me to sign a petition. No preachers damn me. No rock bands set up between me and the rock doves. No dogs, no salesmen, and no friends: I love the Putting Green.

(The other out-of-the-way spot he mentions, which he calls "Top Ramen", is the old Fourth Avenue Plaza, which was torn out a few years ago to make room for the university's new engineering building.)

The first time I dropped by to take photos of the place, there was a guy studying there, and he seemed startled to see another person wander by. So I bailed and came back later, because I wanted photos without any people in them, because it doesn't look properly obscure and forgotten when somebody's sitting there with his nose in a linear algebra textbook. (It might not have been linear algebra, I didn't actually check.)

In 2004, PSU's Student Gardening Committee saw the underused space and lobbied to turn it into a community garden. That didn't go anywhere, as the Stott Center insisted they used it now and then as "overflow space". The student gardeners ended up with a lot at 12th & Montgomery instead, which seems like a much nicer spot for gardening than the putting green site, without all the trees and buildings blocking out the sun.

More recently, this spot figured in ChronoOps: Survive the FuturePast, a student-created augmented reality iPhone game set on the PSU campus. Apparently the plot involves time travel, and hunting for a "green technology" artifact, and avoiding mysterious enemies. Which ends up being a walking tour of the PSU campus, basically. It mostly showcases the endless sustainability projects around the campus, but ventures behind the greenhouses for a bit of sci-fi dystopia. As the creators' paper puts it, "Through juxtaposing scenes of modern technology with long-forgotten projects (a desolate putting green, or old landscaping now overgrown), ChronoOps delivers a visceral and lasting experience." Sadly I can't try the game out because it's iOS-only, and I'm on Team Android. But hey, if there isn't an Android version, how good could it be, anyway?

Clifton Street Park Block

This is a story about two of Portland's South Park Blocks, one lost, the other forgotten. The city describes today's park as the twelve blocks along Park Avenue, between Salmon (on the north end) and Jackson (on the south end), ending at the overpass over Interstate 405. Older accounts are slightly different; to pick one example, Oregon, End of the Trail, a Depression-era tour guide from the WPA Federal Writers Project, said there were 13 South Park Blocks, stretching from SW Salmon to SW Clifton. Clifton Street might not ring a bell, so I've embedded a map above. As you can see there, the missing thirteenth block between Jackson and Clifton was where I-405 is today. The overpass that replaced it is wider than it needs to be and includes a series of concrete planters, which usually aren't maintained very well. I suppose that was done as a token replacement for the lost park block. The city parks website fails to mention anything about sacrificing a park block to the almighty freeway. I don't suppose it's an episode they really feel like talking about. More surprisingly, so far I haven't found anything in the Oregonian database about it either. I would have thought it would have generated a few letters to the editor, at least, but if so I haven't seen them.

I did find the original 1964 agreement between the city and the state highway department, in which the city agreed to hand over the land, and further agreed to be responsible for the landscaping on the overpass, in order to "restore thereon as a park as much of the area as is possible on the structure", while the state would be responsible for the overpass itself. So when nobody's trimming the weeds on the overpass (which is the usual state of affairs), at least we know who's neglecting it.

The downtown street grid bumps up against the West Hills just south of I-405, but there are a couple of short segments of SW Park that briefly continue south of Clifton St. One dead-ends into the Park Terrace apartment complex, while the other continues at an angle to Lincoln St. The apartment complex takes up much of the space between the two, but the city parks bureau does own a triangle of land bordering Clifton. It must've been considered part of the South Park Blocks before I-405 ate its neighbor and orphaned it, even though it's small and apparently wasn't included in anyone's count of blocks. It kind of reminds me of Ankeny Park, the oddball North Park Block just south of Burnside, but this one's way more obscure. If the South Park Blocks now officially end at Jackson, and this little place no longer counts as part, I'm not sure what name to call it; I went with "Clifton Street Park Block" in the title, since that's at least a reasonable description.

The orphan park block has looked well-maintained whenever I've been by there, so it's not as if the city's completely forgotten about it, even if they've kicked it out of the exclusive South Park Blocks club. I suppose they just don't know what to do with the place. If I might offer a suggestion, the "mainstream" South Park Blocks include statues of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Why not continue the theme here? An obscure park block could be a good home for an equally obscure presidential statue. Franklin Pierce, say, or Chester A. Arthur, or Gerald Ford. Or for extra credit, one of the Articles of Confederation presidents (John Hanson, say), or one of the Continental Congress guys. Hopefully with a plaque explaining who the lucky honoree was.

Composition

The next object outside the Portland Art Museum is Michihiro Kosuge's Composition. The museum's page about it gives the date as 1960-1974; I'm not sure what the 14 year time span means: Designed in 1960 and fabricated in 1974? Slowly constructed in fits and starts over a decade and a half? The page does't explain. Kosuge also created Continuation for the circa-2009 MAX Green Line project, created from recycled bits of an old fountain from the original transit mall. Given how much time elapsed between the two, I suppose it's no surprise that they don't closely resemble each other.

Composition was in the personal collection of sculptor Tom Hardy (best known for various animal sculptures, & the series of Oregon Landscape panels at PSU). He donated it to the art museum in 1982.

I've mentioned before that I walked in to the museum's outdoor sculpture court and was able to guess the artist for a surprising number of the pieces. This wasn't one of them. I saw the Cor-Ten steel and the size and immediately assumed it was a Lee Kelly, a companion to his Arlie on the other side of the plaza. I was thinking it was one of his better efforts, somehow more elegant and mathematical than the others, and then I realized it wasn't his at all. So yeah, I do kind of like it, aside from my usual grumbling about Cor-Ten as a medium. Portland Public Art didn't like it, although that's sort of par for the course at that erstwhile blog. Kosuge was recently profiled in a February 2013 Oregon Art Beat segment, in connection with a PICA show last spring featuring his work.

Peace Poles, 5th & Montgomery

Barring the unexpected, this is the closest I'm going to have to a holiday blog post this year. Which is fine; I'm not much of a holiday person, and most years (other than 2010) I don't post anything even remotely Christmassy. But this sort of seemed to fit the bill, at least in the generic peace-on-earth, goodwill-to-all sense. On the Portland State campus, near the corner of 5th & Montgomery, is a trio of poles inscribed with "May Peace Prevail on Earth" in various languages. The sign next to them says they're "Peace Poles", donated by the PSU class of 2001-2002. Apparently the PSU poles are part of a global effort that's been erecting similar poles around the globe for several decades now, including several across Oregon. I had no idea this was something that existed, surprisingly. Because it's Christmas, I'm just going to approve of the general sentiment and not snark at length about hippies or whether peace poles do any actual good. So, ok, the poles technically aren't a Christmas thing at all, and I don't mean to ruin the holiday spirit or anything, but the movement behind peace poles was a response to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the PSU poles commemorate 9/11. Still, the sign next to the PSU poles doesn't mention any of that, so you're free to interpret it in a more upbeat sort of way if you prefer, which I do.

More Everyday Sunshine

As a general rule of thumb, Portland's public art buyers don't usually go for conceptual stuff. Abstract stainless steel whatzits are still the safe choice here, made by the same usual suspects who've been making them since the 70s, and who will happily cobble together yet another one whenever a new public works project needs to burn its one percent for art. Our subject today is one of the few rare exceptions to the rule of thumb, one which made a quick cameo here in a post back in 2006:

... I've finally figured out something that's been puzzling me for months now. At several spots along the streetcar line, and at other locations in the Pearl, there are these motion-sensored spotlights with solar panels attached, aimed at the sidewalk. Sometimes they trigger and click on when you walk by, which can be a little surprising. There's one on SW 10th around Stark or Alder or Washington that clicks on and illuminates a manhole cover in the sidewalk. The first time I saw this it startled me. I thought it must be some sort of inexplicable homeland security measure or utility maintenance aid or something. Turns out the spotlights are part of an art installation titled More Everyday Sunshine, by Harrell Fletcher. It all makes sense now. I had a feeling it might be art, but it isn't labelled anywhere, and the equipment for each light is quite utilitarian, so it was hard to be sure.

I like the fact that the spotlights come with no signs or explanations attached, adding a touch of mystery to ordinary downtown streets. Knowing their purpose is like belonging to a secret society, without all the funny handshakes and world domination. The Tribune dug into this mystery in a 2007 Stumptown Stumper, which included a brief interview with their creator. The lights have also gotten a five-star Yelp review, oddly enough, which is possibly the Internet's only source of art criticism even less authoritative than the humble blog you're reading now. Elsewhere in the blogosphere (a word I haven't used in years, to be honest -- is there still a blogosphere?), More Everyday Sunshine is the nightcap on someone's tour of interesting Portland attractions and it gets a mention in a post at The Hallucinogenic Toreador that also covers murals from China's Cultural Revolution and a few of the author's ideas for future art projects.

This post took a while to create. At first I only had some daytime photos of the solar panels and lighting gear, which aren't very photogenic, and I had no pictures of it actually in operation. I felt this post couldn't go live with just the daytime photos, since I wasn't really capturing the essence of the thing that way, and I take that seriously for some reason. It's not that I wasn't trying to get proper nighttime photos, mind you. I wandered around a couple of times trying to get various spotlights to trigger, hopefully without arousing suspicion and getting tasered by Officer Friendly, or having to explain this quixotic internet quest to random Midwestern tourists who want to meet a real live Weird Portlander. I finally got a couple of spotlights to light up this evening, and I got a few photos, so this post could finally move forward. One photo shows an illuminated shrub outside an apartment building at 11th & Columbia, while another shows a pool of light on the sidewalk at 5th & Mill. Neither one is really all that spectacular, but I think they get the general idea across. I tried a few other spotlights but they wouldn't come on for me. So either some of the lights are out of order, or I just haven't figured out the secret trick to making them light up on command. The fact that a couple of them came on suggests that I'm probably not a vampire. So that's encouraging, at least; with my luck I'd end up as the sparkly sort of vampire, which would be embarrassing.

The RACC page for More Everyday Sunshine includes a detailed artist's statement:

As a kid I would go for walks with my father and he would point things out to me. He seemed interested in everything—an architectural detail, an old tree, a geological formation, a historical monument, an unusual shop or restaurant. Features otherwise hidden to me would be revealed and made significant while spending time with him.

Over the past eight years I have worked on projects exploring the dynamics of social spaces, communities, and environments. These projects have taken the form of installations, publications, educational activities, and public art pieces and have involved a variety of populations: middle school students in Oakland, office workers from the City of Richmond, local residents from the Sunset District in San Francisco, students living in dorms at the University of Washington, shoppers at a mall in Pleasanton, urban gardeners in the Mission District of San Francisco, among others.

My project for the Streetcar Alignment brings together my early memories of walks with my father, photography, and my involvement with community based art projects. To do this I will install a series of solar powered lights on motion sensors to literally highlight aspects of the neighborhoods that the streetcar will be running through. The units would be attached to pre-existing street car poles and operate from dusk to late evening. It’s evident that these neighborhoods already have cultural and aesthetic qualities that define them.

The idea draws strictly on what the various neighborhoods along the alignment already have—unusual architecture, old signs, specific trees, old fire hydrants and infrastructure, etc. I will choose several locations to just light a circular spot on the sidewalk that a person could walk into and for a moment stand out for their own visual or gestural significance. In a way, the lights would act as real time photographs of interesting aspects in Portland’s nighttime urban environment.

If you want to track down the spotlights yourself and see if you have better luck triggering them than I did, I came up with a list of locations from one of the RACC public art maps. They're only along the streetcar's NS line as it existed in 2004, so there's nothing on the Eastside or along the South Waterfront extension.

1. SW 5th & Mill (platform spot)
2. SW 4th & Montgomery (drinking fountain)
3. SW Park & Market (tree knot)
4. SW 10th & Mill (bench)
5. SW 11th & Columbia (flower bed)
6. SW 11th & Jefferson (tree)
7. SW 10th & Yamhill (library bench)
8. SW 11th & Yamhill (face in molding)
9. SW 10th & Washington (manhole cover)
10. NW 10th & Couch (manhole in sidewalk)
11. NW 10th & Hoyt (downspout)
12. NW 11th & Flanders (building vent)
13. NW 11th & Irving (bench)
14. NW 16th & Northrup (metal in asphalt)
15. NW 21st & Northrup (word on back of building)

For extra credit, see this 2003 Mercury story on Fletcher's And Even More Everyday Sunshine, a photographic exhibit at the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice in downtown Portland. That was a decade ago, though, and it's probably long gone by now. I haven't worked up the nerve to go in and check.

In the Shadow of the Elm

In Portland's South Park Blocks, between Market & Clay, the outline of a tree appears on the ground, like something the Ent police would draw at a crime scene. This is In the Shadow of the Elm, described as depicting "the shadow of an Elm tree that used to stand at the site. It is made of 169 individually cut pieces of “Sierra White” granite." The city's South Park Blocks page cautiously states "installed in 1984, depicts the shadow of a tree that may have once existed within the grid of trees in the block". A press release from Marylhurst University (where the sculptor taught for many years) gets a bit melodramatic: "Paul Sutinen's public art piece "In the Shadow of the Elm" (in the Park Blocks between the Art Museum and PSU) is one of the treasures of Portland. Simultaneously subtle and magnificent, it is a stone shadow of a great elm tree that is no longer there."

This possibly-hypothetical tree could have died of any number of causes, assuming it existed, but the big threat to the Park Blocks' remaining American elm trees is Dutch elm disease, a fungal plague that arrived here in the 1970s and has been slowly killing off the city's elm trees. There are official city programs, and volunteer efforts, and public awareness campaigns around trying to stop or slow down the disease, but it's possible all the elms in the Park Blocks are living on borrowed time. It's worth pointing out here that elm trees are not a native tree species in this part of the world, but it would still be sad to lose them all.

A few resistant strains of elm tree have been located or developed, and in 1995 a maybe-replacement tree was planted just south of the "stump marker". It turns out the new tree was planted as a memorial to the Oklahoma City bombing, and was planted just weeks after the event.

In any case, the sculpture project was approved in 1983 as part of an effort to revitalize the South Park Blocks between Market and Jefferson. The idea that the Park Blocks would need revitalizing seems bizarre today, but apparently it was deemed necessary at the time. The project was funded with $50,000 from the National Park Service, via the "Emergency Jobs Act of 1983" (an economic stimulus bill which was generally seen as unsuccessful.)

The most surprising thing about In the Shadow of the Elm is that it's three decades old, and was not invented as part of a Portlandia sketch. I mean, an elaborate civic memorial to a tree? A tree that may not have even existed? That's a bit beyond "put a bird on it" or even "we can pickle that", if you ask me.

In the Shadow of the Elm recently acquired a cheery tropical sibling: In the Shadow of the Palm was created in December 2012 during an artistic residency at the Robert Rauschenberg estate in Captiva, Florida. I think I actually like the sibling better, just because it involves sunshine and palm trees.

Peace Chant

Today's stop in our ongoing public art meander takes us back to the South Park Blocks, between Jefferson & Columbia, home to a jumble of rough stone blocks titled Peace Chant:

Steve Gillman’s “Peace Chant” is the first known peace memorial in Oregon. Gillman designed the sculpture to create a space where people could sit and have quiet time. In his work, he uses the nature of the stone to create a feeling of space and time, juxtaposing natural, manmade, and architectural elements to remind of us of man’s place in nature.

The city designated this Park Block as "Peace Plaza" in May 1985, shortly after Peace Chant was installed, thanks to a petition by local religious groups. The Oregonian article states that no public funds were to be spent as a result, and quotes a local rabbi who stated "The Peace Plaza in itself will solve no problems and will offer no solutions". The article also notes in passing that "[Mayor] Clark said the plaza used to contain a sign with names of persons killed in World War II", but doesn't explain how long ago that was. A more recent whim of the city council sited a Portland Loo in the same block, displeasing the local neighborhood association and others who saw it as sort of desecrating the local peace monument.

A snarky article in the November 24th, 1985 Oregonian included it in a rogue's gallery of the worst public art in town, saying "A Pile of Rubble" would be a more appropriate title. A June 1985 profile of Gillman explained that this was his preferred style; something about respecting the "integrity of the stone".

Portland Public Art snarked about Peace Chant, saying of it (and a small companion piece across the street)

Both are granite pomo obelisks, cracked and scarred, very Artforum hip, circa 1980. The artist is Steve Gilman, who made a few more sculptures like this and then found more useful work to pursue.

The larger section of sculpture, Peace Chant, lying akimbo to walking traffic in the midst of the Park Block, is another excellent reason for revisioning public art placements. What can you say about it? Like Shelley Duvall in her heartbreaking performance as Olive Oyl, “He’s Large!”

It’s large, and kids from the daycare like to jump off it. That’s about all one needs say about it.

The aforementioned "a few more sculptures" includes at least one other Portland-area example, in Troutdale's Blue Lake Park, titled Wind Plane.

A few years ago the PSU Vanguard scratched its head about Peace Chant and directed readers to the Portland Public Art post. Peace Chant has also showed up on this humble blog once before, in a post about walking through the park blocks, and I linked to the Portland Public Art post too. At the time I had no idea I'd be doing a public art project of my own a few years down the road. To be honest, I probably wouldn't be doing this project at all if PPA hadn't gone on maybe-permanent hiatus a few years ago.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Peace Chant drew the ire of a local conservative author several years ago, in a Portland Tribune editorial ranting about the evils of modern abstract art. He merely described it as "three sprawling, nondescript slabs of broken stone", but saw it as a symptom of a wider societal sickness. Apparently the purpose of art is to uplift the public while indoctrinating them with traditional values, something abstract art pretty much completely fails to do. As I said earlier, you'd think he'd be delighted that a sculpture dedicated to world peace is so utterly ineffective at getting its point across. But there's just no pleasing some people, I guess.

A more unusual take on Peace Chant comes in the November 1985 issue of Oregon Geology, the monthly magazine of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries. It's one stop in a walking tour of the South Park Blocks & vicinity (pp 127-134), pointing out interesting rocks and minerals used in the construction of different structures. Peace Chant gets a brief mention:

Of more recent vintage than the bronze statues is the group of large, white granite blocks forming the sculpture named "Peace Chant" (g) that adorns the Peace Plaza in the Park Block between Columbia and Jefferson Streets. This 1984 sculpture is also by Eugene sculptor Steve Gillman. The stone came from near Fresno in southern California, and the upright piece weighs approximately 20,000 pounds. The long, thin grooves visible in the blocks are from the wire saw used to saw the blocks directly from the ground.

Memorial Inscription

A slideshow about Memorial Inscription, a public art piece outside Portland State's Epler Hall student housing tower. As the name suggests, it memorializes Stephen Epler, who in 1946 founded what evolved into PSU. A cluster of low benches have inscriptions briefly describing Epler's work, and behind them a set of stainless steel panels are etched in what looks like an unknown language.

To understand what's going on here, here's a quote from Margot Voorhies Thompson's artist bio at the US State Department's Art in Embassies program:

"Over my career, my interest in calligraphy has led me to create my own vernacular alphabets that reference elements of historical letterforms. My intention is to combine both archaic and futuristic elements while encoding beneath the surface poetry, literature and song. The invention of language and writing systems is a uniquely human phenomenon. Similar to nature, linguistics has the ability to reinvent itself and adapt over time, or run to extinction. This loss of diversity echoes the fate of our plant and animal kingdoms. By creating my own alphabets, the meaning and impact of the language is changed. The components are abstracted into indecipherable line and shape as I incorporate them into my paintings and prints. I am interested in deconstructing and recreating the language using repeated characters, line spacing and other patterns related to writing, books and scrolls. The meaning of this abstraction is to question what is being communicated. I want the viewer to interpret and wonder anew what they see, much like an archaeological find where an artifact inscribed with a mysterious form transcends symbolism, turning into something more elemental. In my work as a calligrapher, printmaker and painter, tools and surfaces determine the character of the writing and inscription."

Her website shows Memorial Inscription and several other examples of this style. I think it's beautiful. I have to draw a comparison here with another imaginary-alphabet inscription, on the fish-alien fake monument Mimir, which I think has more of a whimsical intent than Memorial Inscription does. A bona-fide art critic (which I've never, ever claimed to be) would likely dismiss this superficial, which is probably accurate. Especially since I don't actually have an interesting compare-n-contrast point to make here; I suppose I'm just pointing out that someone else made art with an invented alphabet and I have photos of that too. So if you'd like a refund of every cent you paid to read this, feel free to leave a comment below or something.

Memorial Inscription is actually a bit tough to find. SW Montgomery is pedestrian-only through much of the PSU campus, including here. Epler Hall shares a block with a much older apartment building, with a narrow alley between them, and the art's down at the far end of the alley. Did I say "alley"? Epler is a LEED-certified green building, so this not-an-alley is supposed to be a sort of educational eco-plaza that does magic things with stormwater. Kind of like the one Portland Community College has over on the eastside. Oh, there I go comparing and contrasting again. Like I said, feel free to request your refund down in the comments section.

Cobbletale

A few photos of Cobbletale, on the Portland State campus at 11th & Mill St. The artist statement, via the UO Library's One Percent for Art digital collection:

Cobbletale metamorphises the West Hall courtyard into a topographic landscape and kinesthetic artwork. It is meant to be experienced by touching (feet, hands, posterior) as well as by sight. Cobbletale examines and appreciates, both geologically and in the more recent historical sense, Portland's cobblestones. In a subtler way, Cobbetale is a site-specific metaphor for history's layers and transformations. Either way, it constradicts and expands the notion of the courtyard. Through its materials, shape and scale, Cobbletale empowers the site's surrounding architectural forms and landscape paintings. The idea for Cobbletale came from the design team's discovery that cobblestones were unearthed during preparation for West Hall's construction. Sometime around the turn of the [19th] century, they had been laid along a streetcar route on Southwest 11th. Their location was at the edge of the present artwork. Some of these original cobblestones are now a part of Cobbletale. During the sixteen-month period of creating Cobbletale, the artist gained assistance from eleven different state and local agencies and bureaus, as well as three museaums and numerous private individuals. In order to gather an appropriate ""pallet"" of materials, the artist hand cleaned over 6,000 cobblestones with a hammer and scrub brush, eventually using approximately 4,000 and returning the remainder to the city's storage (Mayer, 1992).

The fun thing about Cobbletale is that it was created in 1992, nearly a decade before today's Portland Streetcar began operating. Streetcars were strictly an object of romantic nostalgia at that point, and there was every reason to believe they were gone for good. The present-day streetcar has a stop just two blocks west of here, and another two blocks north. Still, cobblestones haven't really come back into vogue yet, so there's that.

The bottom photo in this post was actually taken way back in 2006. I knew I had an old Flickr photo of it, but I couldn't recall writing anything about it, so I figured it must've shown up in one of those "miscellaneous random photos" posts I used to do. But I checked all of those & didn't see it, and neither Blogger search nor Google were any help. I had a multi-megabyte full-blog-export XML file lying around from the last time I updated the Cyclotram Map, so I was able to track it down that way (although TextEdit bogged down on the big file & I had to use Emacs instead).

Another sort of blog post I used to do was a bullet point list of unrelated news items and tidbits from around the interwebs. Which seemed like a great idea back then because Twitter didn't exist yet. In a post of that sort from almost exactly 7 years ago, I tacked an item on the end linking to (but not inlining) a few photos I hadn't used yet. I needed to do that because I didn't yet have a Flickr Pro account, and until recently free Flickr accounts only let you browse your 200 most recent photos. You could still access them if you had a direct link, but you couldn't browse through your photos with the 'next' button and see them. So I posted links just so I'd continue to have access to those photos. But I didn't even bother explaining what they were photos of, so it's entirely possible -- probable, even -- that nobody has ever clicked those links in all this time.

I'm thinking maybe I'll go back and edit the old post & inline those photos. Just on the general principle of trying to do things the right way, even if nobody ever sees it. I don't get search hits on 2006 posts too often. People might find it from the post you're reading now, assuming anyone stumbles across it. Which they might now, but in another 7 years? I mean, nobody's going to want to look at plain old photos in the year 2020. Either a.) You'll need full holographic video with HD smell-o-vision, or your fickle audience will go elsewhere; or b.) everyone's too busy scavenging and fleeing atomic mutants to worry about this stuff. I'm not really sure which is more likely.

Fourth Avenue Plaza

This post, unusually, is about a public space that no longer exists: The former Fourth Avenue Plaza, an odd park-like area on SW 4th Avenue at Hall. Several years ago, in a very early post about bad local art, I went a bit over the top while snarking about the place:

... a tall cylinder covered in ceramic tiles, all in the same burnt orange color. It was set in a small grassy plaza, with a long series of steps leading up to it as if it were some sort of edifying monumental work. A formal setting, but with mute, soul-crushing emptiness at the center: Instead of a winged Victory, there was a parking garage pillar, encrusted in tiles swiped from a groovy 70's-era public toilet. It's gone now, plaza and all, replaced by Portland State University's new CompSci building. I'd have to call that a real, quantifiable improvement. No word on what happened to the old "sculpture". Perhaps it was dynamited.

I didn't manage to get any photos of the place before they tore it out, so I left it at that. Vintage Portland recently did a post about the place, which was once known as "Fourth Avenue Plaza", and the post included a color photo of the plaza. So I kind of wanted to pass that link along, and I figured I could at least snap a few quick phone photos to show you what the area looks like now. The key thing to understand is that it was never a city park; it was a landscaped area on top of the underground parking garage for an adjacent Pacific Northwest Bell office.

It won a number of awards when it was created in 1976, including a Community Improvement Award from the Portland Chamber of Commerce, and an award from the Portland Beautification Association, whatever that is or was. They called the plaza "perhaps the most skillfully disguised parking structure in this city" and raved "in a place where (the company) may have built just another highrise, landscaped parking lot, we have instead a stunningly handsome space." So, tastes vary widely over time. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. The rest of the Beautification awardees are a fascinating slice of mid-1970s Portland aspirations: The KGW Neighborfair (an annual festival in Waterfront park that ran through some time in the late 80s or early 90s.), the new Galleria mall (before all its stores cratered), and McCarthy Park on Swan Island.

The column may have been dubious mid-70s art, or it may have been a decorated vent for the underground garage, I'm not really sure which. There's a similar, surviving column a bit further north on 4th Avenue, which may be a second garage vent, or a second of whatever the first one was. I'd been kind of hoping it was the same column, just relocated, but the surviving one looks smaller, and it's brown instead of orange. I guess because it was the 70s and you had two of anything, one of them had to be brown and the other one orange.

If I'm understanding old versus new photos correctly, Fourth Avenue Plaza was roughly in the spot of the present day TECOTOSH sculpture, and the "Gerding Edlen Development Plaza" it sits in. Maybe PSU had to agree to build a new plaza here as part of the building permit process, sort of like what developers have to do with wetlands mitigation. Or it just sort of worked out that way.