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.

Nothing Good Comes Easy

Next up is a giant mural of the words "Nothing Good Comes Easy", on the upper stories of a building at SE Grand & Pine. This was created for the 2015 Forest for the Trees event by Ola Volo & Zach Yarrington. I'm not a huge fan of the "ginormous motivational affirmation" style of mural, but they've been proliferating across the city in recent years, so obviously someone likes them.

All That Is Gold

The next stop on the mural tour takes us to NE 33rd & Sandy, where All That Is Gold is hidden down a gated alley next to the Laurelhurst Studios building. The mural was created in 2014 by Gage Hamilton and Zach Yarrington, whose names you might recognize from innumerable Forest For The Trees murals over the last few years.

The title's painted up toward the top of the building and is hard to see from street level; I'm not sure where it's meant to be viewed from. The iceberg theme around the alley entrance made me think the title said "Cold" rather than "Gold". Luckily I ran across some photos and making-of videos that cleared this up before I hit Publish. That would have been sort of embarrassing. Not as bad as the New York Times spinning lurid tales of Iraqi WMDs that, um, never existed, but embarrassing by this humble blog's usual standards.

Keep Your Chin Up

The next stop on the mural tour is on NE Alberta once again; in fact it's on the opposite side of the same building as the last installment (To Oregon With Love), and the artist behind that mural co-created the subject of this post too. So this is Keep Your Chin Up, painted for the Forest for the Trees event by Portland artists Blaine Fontana & Zach Yarrington, and Tokyo's Jun Inoue.

So there's sort of a local mural subgenre centered on upbeat, inspirational phrases: This one, obviously; the huge Everything is Everything in industrial SE Portland; the phrase "You are confined only by the walls you build yourself" on To Oregon With Love, and probably a few others I'm forgetting offhand. I have to say I have mixed feelings about this subgenre. I can't quite put my finger on what it is, but Alberta was the core of a historically black neighborhood that's now gentrifying at warp speed, displacing many longtime residents in the process. In this context, murals coaching people about unlimited personal achievement seem a bit... problematic, if you ask me.

The Future Will Be Hairy

The next mural on our tour is The Future Will be Hairy, on the upper story of a building in the 2100 block of NE Sandy. It's another Forest for the Trees mural, from the inaugural 2013 festival. That Oregonian article has much better photos than mine; I wish I knew where they were taken from, since I couldn't find a better angle than what you see here. Anyway, the mural's a collaboration by three artists whose work has appeared here before: Zach Yarrington, who created the huge Everything is Everything in SE Portland; Gage Hamilton, who did the DeSoto Building mural for the 2014 Forest for the Trees; and Madsteez, who collaborated on the Clyde Drexler mural at SE 9th & Clay. A page at MadeByBand has the inevitable bunch of photos of the mural being painted. A thing I didn't realize until now is that the 2013 festival also featured a limited edition line of clothing & shoes. Apparently you could buy a "The Future Will Be Hairy" bow tie, or even custom Chuck Taylors. That sounds odd, but we're already putting our old airport carpet pattern on every imaginable consumer product, so it's a bit late to complain about some mural-themed high tops.

Everything is Everything

The next mural up is Everything is Everything, which is basically just an enormous painting of the words "Everything is Everything". It's located on a warehouse facing SE Division next to the MLK/Grand Viaduct, and was created by Zach Yarrington for the 2014 Forest for the Trees mural event.

It's tempting to chalk the phrase up as some sort of empty hipster affirmation, but it's also the title of a 1998 Lauryn Hill song: