If you've seen any of the construction sites for Portland's upcoming Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail project, you may have noticed that the usual orange silt fencing has words stenciled all over it. Turns out this is a conceptual art project called Art Starts Now, the first phase of a larger project titled simply Orange Lining. Before construction began, local residents were invited to submit short blurbs of text for use in the project, and of the roughly 1100 submissions, 102 were selected for use in the project. You might think that, as a semi-obsessive Twitter user, I would have been a natural for this sort of contest, but I couldn't think of anything to enter. Based on the eventual selections, they seem to have been looking for something more poetic and upbeat than anything I likely would have submitted anyway. So, no biggie.
In any case, most of the selected lines will also end up in a more permanent form in phase two of Orange Lining, which they're calling simply Impressed Concrete. Which involves the lines being impressed into concrete sidewalks here and there along the new light rail line. I've seen a few of those around already, but I think I'll collect a few more before creating a post about them.
