Chain of Life / Pioneer Quilts

By now you're probably getting sick of crappy old Blackberry photos. Believe me, I sympathize, I really do, and at least this one marks the end of the Green Line. As I said in an earlier post, I realize I ought to have gone back and taken better photos, but I realized I wasn't going to get around to it any time soon. Doubly so in this case; this stop is at the Clackamas Town Center MAX station, and taking better photos right now would involve visiting a suburban mall during the Christmas shopping season. I'll go to surprising lengths for y'all, o Gentle Reader(s), and I never get tired of pointing that out, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and I'm drawing it at mall Santas.

In any event, here's TriMet's blurb about the art here:

The Chain of Life, by Richard "Dick" Elliott, includes patterns found in indigenous basketry, pioneer quilts and the spiral shape of DNA. The work appears in the brick pavers of the station platform, in the cut steel designs of the walkway guardrails and in windows of the parking garage elevator shaft.

The photo I have is of one of the pioneer quilt designs, on an elevated walkway from the mall parking lot to the MAX station. It's a better photo than most of my Green Line photos because I had to actually get off the train this time, but it's still just a Blackberry photo and I only took one. In my defense, I didn't realize Chain of Life was a multipart thing, and I wasn't able to look it up on the go with 2010's primitive mobile internet technology. In any case, the artist's website describes the pioneer quilt designs:

The next link in time relates to the settling of Oregon. The cut steel designs on the railings that connect the parking garage to the platform were created to honor pioneer quilt makers. They allow an expression of my long-standing study and appreciation of quilts. Mary Bywater Cross, author of Quilts of the Oregon Trail, was a consultant on this part of the project.

Waving Post

The next stop on the Green Line tour is the Fuller Road MAX station, home to Waving Post, which you can barely make out in this terrible Blackberry photo. It's the sort of curved spiky-looking thing in the distance, toward the right of the photo. TriMet's description of it:

The SE Fuller Rd station is located in a section of the Con Battin neighborhood that was isolated from the rest of the neighborhood by the freeway in the late 1970s. Pete Beeman's Waving Post invites viewers to turn the crank, bring the sculpture to life and wave to the neighbors.

Beeman also created Pod (a.k.a. "Satan's Testicle"), the stainless steel kinetic whatzit across the street from Powell's on Burnside. A 2006 Stumptown Stumper at the Tribune explains Pod a bit, and mentions Waving Post briefly as a coming attraction.

I realize this is a crappy photo, but even a great still photo can only tell you so much about a thing like this that's designed to move. Fortunately Beeman posted a short Vimeo video that shows what happens when you turn the crank. It looks cooler, and more graceful, than you'd expect given the whole "waving at the neighbors" concept.

Another TriMet page with statements from various Green Line artists includes this about Waving Post:

The forms of Waving Post are visually suggestive without being too explicit. When I designed the yellow and red horizontal elements, I wanted them to suggest different things to different viewers. One person might come to it and see a human spine; another might see a dinosaur bone, bird wings or even a building truss.

The Fuller Road station is located in an old neighborhood named for an Oregon Trail family. When the freeway went in, the neighborhood was bisected and mostly eliminated. When I realized that a one-block piece of Con Battin Road continued on the other side of I-205, I wanted to make a sculpture that could wave hello at that distant piece of street across the way.

I don't claim to be an expert on this part of town, but I'd never heard of a "Con Battin neighborhood" before. I checked the Oregonian historical database but didn't see anything interesting; I imagine this area was just too far from town to merit discussing in print, from their point of view. Luckily TriMet rides to the rescue again, something they almost never do in real life. As part of the Green Line project, they put together a "Cultural History" of neighborhoods along I-205, and it includes a history blurb about the area:

Formerly known as the Battin neighborhood, this area takes its name from the Battin family who lived here from the 1870s to about the 1950s. Thomas E. Battin came to Oregon from Pennsylvania in 1865, at the age of 19. He came unaccompanied, working as a hired cattle drover for another migrating family. He met his future wife, Caroline, while wintering in Boise. Upon arriving in Oregon, he worked at cutting cord wood and investing in real estate—usually buying portions of claims from earlier settlers. He was the first owner of a parcel of school land in the present- day Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood in Portland, which he bought from the state for $200. Two weeks later, he sold the land for $1000. He settled down on a farm that stretched from Fuller Road to now-gone Jacobson Road (at approximately 90th Avenue) and from Battin Road to Otty Road. Over the years, the Battin property was subdivided among family members, and local streets were named for these children: Battin Road was originally Cleo Battin Road and Con Battin Road was named for C.E. Battin. William Otty Road and J.E. Jacobsen Road were named for claim-holders to the east. Fuller Road was originally Fuller-Price County Road.

The Battin neighborhood was divided, and much of it was removed, when I- 205 was built through the area. Mary Alice Clay, who lived up the hill from the Solid Rock Baptist Church where her husband was the pastor, remembers that church attendance dropped considerably because the freeway forced members to move away. The church survives today with a congregation that primarily live in more distant neighborhoods. Cresslyn Clay, granddaughter of Mary Alice, still lives in her grandparents’ house. Battin Elementary School dates from the 1930s, although Clackamas County School District #54 held a deed as far back as 1917. The school was demolished and replaced with a Home Depot and other stores in 1989.

Lents Hybrids

The next stop along the Green Line is the Lents Town Center / Foster MAX station, home to Lents Hybrids:

Brian Borrello's Lents Hybrids is a series of spiraling plant forms with "buds" that generate energy through a hybrid system of wind and solar generators. The pieces are evocative of the native long grasses that may have once grown near the station area, while the buds are symbolic of the unfolding beauty and potential for the Lents neighborhood.

I only managed to capture one of the sets of hybrids while riding by on the train. There's at least one more at the station, with four spiraling stems instead of two. And I didn't do the two-stem one justice either, this being yet another crappy Blackberry photo taken from a moving MAX train.

Borrello also created People's Bike Library of Portland in downtown Portland, Silicon Forest on the MAX Yellow Line, the blue ox feet at the Kenton MAX station, and apparently much, much more, including some giant filberts he's creating for the City of Tigard. Like Lents Hybrids, Silicon Forest is a collection of tall, skinny solar-powered tree structures. Add in More Everyday Sunshine and Nepenthes, and it starts to look like solar-powered art is a hot local trend right now. Or at least it will probably look that way to art historians a century from now.

Neighborhood Notes has a few construction photos. East PDX News has a few more, plus one of the finished product glowing blue at night, which looks kind of cool in a Lothlorien/Vegas sort of way. Lents Grown mentions a second artwork at the MAX station, Out of the Brambles by Wayne Chabre (who also created Connections at the Multnomah County building on Hawthorne). It looks like I would've needed to get off the train in order to see it, though, and even if I'd been in the mood to get off at each stop and look around, TriMet's website neglects to even mention that it's there.

As with Sky to Earth elsewhere on the Green Line, Lents Hybrids was created with help from a local pipe bending company. That sounds kind of esoteric, but their photo galleries showcasing their work are actually pretty interesting. Go take a look if you don't believe me.

Shared Vision

The next stop on our tour of MAX Green Line art is Shared Vision, at the SE Holgate MAX station. TriMet's description:

Lanterns are popular festival decorations associated with gaiety and rejoicing, and are reminders of the security of a light in the window. By using light as a metaphor for expanded awareness, Suzanne Lee's Shared Vision represents prosperity as the richness of positive social interaction and communication—the very essence of neighborhood.

Another TriMet page elaborates a bit:

Five ornate lanterns developed by Suzanne Lee are the central elements of this multicultural sculpture. Sited above the station platform, the illuminated sculpture appears like a beacon at night.

I haven't found a lot of info to pass along about this one. Oldtrails.com has a better photo of it, and OregonLive has an interesting close up construction photo, showing a level of detail that ordinary MAX passengers probably can't see.

One other item, unfortunate in light of all this talk about security and positive social interaction. Two people were shot at the Holgate MAX station in October 2013, one fatally. A few days ago, a grand jury concluded the suspect had acted in self defense, and declined to indict him.

Money Tree

The MAX Green Line's Powell Boulevard station is home to Money Tree, the sort of winged post in the distance in the above photo. TriMet's description of it:

Valerie Otani created a contemporary Money Tree to symbolize the revitalization of the neighborhood and hope for the prosperity of the new immigrant communities. The overall form evokes the Douglas fir, and each branch takes its design from traditional folk art of cultures living in the neighborhood

This photo was taken from inside a MAX train, with an inferior-grade phone camera, so you can't really see the branch details, but an Examiner article about Green Line art has a detail photo of part of one branch, which gives a better idea of what it looks like up close.

Otani's work has appeared here a few times before, including Folly Bollards at the downtown Performing Arts Center, and Prescott Biozone on the MAX Yellow Line. She doesn't appear to have a website, so I'm having trouble elaborating on TriMet's rather terse description. They don't even mention which immigrant communities are represented here. I did run across a few mentions of a female Saudi-American artist who collaborated on part of Money Tree. An interview with her describes this segment of the tree:

You may also see one of Huda’s art pieces live in a neighborhood of Portland, Oregon called the “Money Tree” sculpture. It is a beautiful and creative joint public art project designed by both Huda Totonji and a Japanese American artist, Valerie Otani. Dr. Huda Totonji designed a branch of the “Money Tree” 20 feet tall sculpture. It stands tall on Powell Boulevard Station, TriMet, I 205. The theme of the sculpture is the revitalization with new immigrants as they bring prosperity and cultural strength. Dr. Huda’s design incorporates Arabic calligraphy that communicates good wishes for prosperity from the Muslim traditions.

As we continue through the Green Line sculptures, you'll notice a theme developing. With a few exceptions, they tend to be tall poles (such as the one here) with much of the design elements overhead and out of reach. I imagine this is to thwart casual vandals, metal thieves, and teenage boys who want to impress people by climbing them, because this part of the outer eastside isn't the most upscale part of town, and TriMet's afraid of whatever mischief the restless natives might get up to. That's my theory, anyway.

Sky to Earth

The MAX Green Line's SE Division station is bordered by a curving blue chain-link fence. The is actually the art installation for this MAX stop, which Trimet describes thusly:

Sky to Earth, by Carolyn Law, is a vivid sky blue fence that rides the visual edge between the light rail tracks on one side and the expansive topography of the surrounding land along the other side. The artwork's flowing and changing sculptural line shifts between solid and transparent, activating the site and the experience of MAX riders.

The artist's website has photos from various angles (all of which seem to be better than my viewpoint aboard a MAX train), and a longer explanation:

The design of the artwork relates specifically to the nature of the site and the alignment of the light rail track as well as dealing with the striking openness and topography of the land where the station and access paths will be located. The artwork rides the visual and experiential edge between all the site’s characteristics.

The site is an intense place with an expansive, open landscape framed by freeway lanes on one side. It can be viewed at many speeds and angles. The other sensory and physical undercurrent here is the sky and the wind. The wind appears to be nearly a constant. The grasses ripple elegantly and somewhat hypnotically, registering the caprice of the wind’s directions from moment to moment.

Within this landscape, the fence is a flowing, changing sculptural line of one color and a form that shifts between solid.

The same page also links to a story about Sky to Earth from "World Fence News", a trade paper that apparently exists. As a trade paper, it points out that a couple of local companies, Portland Fence Co. & Albina Pipe Bending, were key to putting this together. Not mentioned in that article, but found elsewhere on the net, a third company did post sizing and foundation design for the project.

In 2010 the national Chain Link Fence Manufacturers Institute awarded Sky and Earth its 2010 Les Grube Memorial Design Award; previous winners include the prominent architect Frank Gehry, so it seems like this is kind of a big deal, at least within the fence industry. The 2011 award went to a somewhat similar project in Boston, and the 2012 one went to a fence project for an overpass in Kansas City. The 2012 link goes to a page by the design firm explaining the project and going on about what a cool (and unfairly overlooked) material chain link fencing is.

The same year, the group Americans for the Arts named Sky to Earth one of 40 exemplary public artworks completed the previous year.

I suppose I'm pointing out the awards it's won, and the local construction and art fabrication jobs involved in creating it, because this is an artwork that would be easy to demagogue. It's easy to imagine people on talk radio or Facebook ranting about how it's not really art, it's just a chain link fence, we paid how much for it, the citified liberal elitists are trying to pull one over on us, etc., etc. It got a brief and mostly positive mention in an OregonLive article about some weird & alarming art along the WES commuter rail line. Surprisingly the article only has four comments, and they aren't all negative. I suppose modern art just isn't the conservative hot button issue it once was in decades past. That, or they just figure anything within Portland city limits is a lost cause at this point.

Tall and Fallen

Back in the naïve, low-tech days of yore (mid-2010), I'd just gotten a shiny new Blackberry phone, one with both a camera and a Twitter app, and I was pretty stoked about living in the future. The MAX Green Line was less than a year old then and I hadn't yet ridden it to the end at Clackamas Town Center, so one day I decided to make the trip and try this newfangled "live-Tweeting" thing I'd heard so much about. I even used the hashtag "#greenline", so, I guess, the entire world could follow my fearless expedition into Darkest Clackamas. Most of the photos I ended up with were of the new public art along the MAX line, although I wasn't really doing a public art blog project at the time. I think I was just trying to post at least one photo from each MAX station, without actually getting off the train, and the art seemed like a good way to tell the MAX stations apart.

In any case, I recently tracked these photos down in my old Twitpic account, and figured I could maybe reuse them here. None of them are that fabulous (though most are at least better than the one in this post), and if I was truly dedicated to this art project I really ought to go back, get off at each stop, and shoot some quality photos instead, and maybe hit the RAM Brewpub at the mall instead of grabbing tacos and tater tots at the food court like last time. But it's a rather long train ride just to get photos of things I already have photos of, and I'm positive it would be a long wait before I got around to it. Long story short, I'm going to go ahead and post with the photos I have, not with the ones I wish I had.

So this is one of the less successful photos of the series, from the SE Main St MAX station near Mall 205. If you look between the closing MAX doors and beyond the shelter you can see Tall and Fallen, the tall pillar with the jutting triangular bits. TriMet describes it:

The fan-shaped leaf of the ginkgo tree inspired Anne Storrs to create Tall and Fallen. Tall consists of seven abstracted ginkgo leaves cast in concrete and stacked inside four stainless steel poles. Fallen, constructed with the same leaves appearing singly or in pairs, suggests the gingko trees' fallen leaves.

I really do like this one, and I feel kind of bad my only photo of it is so terrible. The artist's web page about it has vastly better photos than mine, with a brief caption:

Inspired by the ancient ginkgo tree, this sculpture is created by stacking seven interlocking ginkgo-like concrete leaf forms in a stainless steel framework, 20’ x 3’ x 3’. More concrete ginkgo elements stacked singly or in pairs are found in the stations' landscape.

Looking around Storrs's website, I realized she also created Begin Again Corner, along the downtown Portland segment of the Green Line. I point this out because my photos in that post are actually pretty decent, in case you're wondering whether I ever take anything besides crappy camera phone shots.

If this was a professionally run blog on a platform less orphaned than Blogger, right about here is where you'd see a "Related Posts" or "You Might Also Enjoy" widget, with results probably generated by a simple keyword match, say on the word "ginkgo" for instance. In which case you'd see links to posts about ginkgo trees in the Plaza Blocks, and maybe the Ginkgo Petrified Forest in Eastern Washington, to pick two random examples with photos better than the one you see here. And if the algorithm looked at geotags, you might also get a link to Milestone P6, just north of Mall 205. Ok, there'd also be a "From Around The Web" section with links to crappy fad diets, celebrity news, anti-Obama rants, and bad investment advice, which is a big reason why I don't have a widget like that here.

chimney fountain (twitpics)

lovejoy fountain (even more twitpics)

keller fountain (more twitpics)

carwash fountain (twitpics)

Some old Twitpics from several years ago, back when having a phone that combined a camera and Twitter seemed like a magical new thing, full of artsy possibilities...

Updated 9/17/14: Except that they aren't Twitpics anymore, as Twitpic's shutting down in a few days. Sic transit gloria mundi, or something.

twitpic'd

Updated 2/8/23: This post started out life as a gallery of Twitpic thumbnails, which (once upon a time) pointed at pages on Twitpic.com hosting the original photos. But Twitpic hasn't existed since 2014, so all the photo links I had here were broken for roughly nine years. I figured the original photos were just gone since I hadn't copied them to Flickr in time, but it seems the Wayback Machine made a sweep thru Twitpic just before they closed up shop, and if I have the original URL it's easy to find archived copies (like this one ). Unfortunately they didn't archive user profiles so I can't get a list of all my photos over there, but I was at least able to rescue the photos in this post plus a few more referenced in Twitter and Google search results, and I could probably find more photos by downloading my Twitter archives (which I've been meaning to do anyway) and searching for old twitpic links there. Anyway, I added them all to an "Ex-Twitpics" set and made a slideshow of them, mostly because recreating a table full of tiny little thumbnail images seemed tedious and dumb in this day and age. The original text of this post follows after the divider:

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So I've got this shiny new phone, and I've only just figured out how to post photos straight to Twitpic. Said photos are then tweeted automagically, which is a handy trick. I, uh, ran a little wild with that today, and here's the damage so far. As far as I know, Twitpic only gives you embeddable html for 150x150 thumbnails, but they're supposed to link to the full-sized originals. So we'll see how that turns out. (Also, here's a link to my Twitpic profile, if you want to browse 'em all for some reason.) (Oh, and my Yfrog one is here. I went back & forth between them until I had a phone that did Instagram.

I've also got an app that posts to Flickr, which is where the other few thousand of my photos live, so that's nice. What I'd really like to do, though, is post one or more photos to Flickr and have them auto-posted here. Geotags and all, if possible. And the same with YouTube videos, ideally. That's the, well, I hesitate to call it a "workflow", but it's the sequence of events I'd like to occur on my behalf. That's got to exist somewhere already, right? I don't seriously have to write a tool for that myself, do I?