smoking cat, mississippi ave.

North Portland's Mississippi Ave. is generally a commercial street, with upscale condos rapidly crowding their way in, but there are still a few old houses along the avenue here and there. Just south of Mason St. there are a couple of hippie-fied houses with an elaborately painted fence out front, featuring a large cigarette-smoking cat. The captions to a couple of Flickr photos by wiredforsound23 claim that the cat was painted by Trent Gibson, while the wizard design around the corner is by someone who goes by "Acid Wizard".

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.

purple creature, sw 2nd

This little creature is painted in a downtown Portland doorway along SW 2nd near Taylor, next to the hyper-trendy Lúc Lắc Vietnamese place. It's been there for a couple of years without anyone painting over it, so I imagine it's supposed to be there. I have a sneaking suspicion it's from an anime or a video game, and I ought to be embarrassed about not getting the pop culture reference. If you know what it is, feel free to make fun of me in the comments below.

Cyclone Bicycle Supply mural

One odd thing I've noticed during this mural project is that Portland bike shops are very likely to have murals outside. I'm not sure why exactly, and it's not like I've run the numbers and have an exact percentage to give you, but it's more common than just about any other sort of business, with the possible exception of tattoo places. Today's example is at Cyclone Bicycle Supply, at 21st & Vaughn in a weird corner of industrial NW Portland. I ran across this one in a Bike Portland article while searching for an entirely different bike mural. The article lists a few of those, and mentions the mural was created in 2012 by artists Jeremy Eaton and Nick Makanna.

The "Go By Bike" sign in the mural is a play on the "Go By Train" neon sign that's long graced Portland's Union Station, and the "Go By Streetcar" sign that's been in the Pearl District since the early 2000s. I could swear I've seen a real, live "Go By Bike" sign somewhere around town, but for the life of me I can't recall where I saw it. It's possible it wasn't real after all and was just a detail in another bike mural. It all gets to be a big blur after a while.

Updated: Apparently the "Go By Bike" sign is at the massive bike corral next to the South Waterfront aerial tram station. Thanks to gl in the comments below and @WookieOfDoom on Twitter for pointing this out. Another commenter mentions there's also a "Go By Cab" sign at Radio Cab in NW Portland. At this rate I have to assume there's a "Go By Enormous SUV" sign somewhere in darkest Tualatin.

Pranayama

The next mural on the agenda is Pranayama, located outside the Yoga Union building at SE 50th & Lincoln, created in 2007 by Dana Lynn Louis. The brief RACC description:

Earth tones and natural shades of red, greens, and blues are used in a diptych portraying a set of abstract yin/yang flower vases reflective of the yoga practiced within the building walls. Local artists and residents participated in its construction.

I am not a yoga person, so I had to google the title of the mural. Wikipedia says "Pranayama" has something to do with yoga-style breathing and related mystical concepts. I think. Although (as a non-yoga person) I'm left scratching my head after reading the article a couple of times. The artist's website gives an alternate title of Unification, in any event.

The yoga studio's website says they're moving to a new building in July 2015, so the mural may or may not stick around after that.

SE 9th & Stark mural

The next mural on the tour is another Forest for the Trees one, a geometric design created by Brazilian artist Marcelo Macedo for the festival's 2013 edition. This one was hard to find; it's down a sorta-alley on SE Stark between 9th & 10th, next to a sketchy Multnomah County corrections building. The alley's blocked off by a chain link fence, and you can't see a lot of the mural due to various things parked in front of it. A photo of it at the site for Honolulu's similar Pow Wow Hawaii festival provides a better look at it than my photos do, if you're curious. The fact that I couldn't see an artsy mural because there was a defunct food cart blocking it sounds like a lame joke from the #PortlandProblems hashtag, but seriously, this is exactly what happened.

Dekumstruction

The next art whatzit we're taking a look at is Dekumstruction, at NE Dekum St. & Durham Ave., right outside Breakside Brewing, and just down the street from Woodlawn Park. This is public art that doubles as a bike rack for a brewpub, and triples as a stormwater management device. It's hard to dream up a more Portlandia thing than this, and naturally it's won all sorts of national awards. The artists' statement from their website:

Dekumstruction is a sculptural artwork installed on top of a custom bike rack, also designed by artists Peg Butler and Buster Simpson. The art installation works as an overhead shelter for the bike rack and uses materials and imagery related to petroleum. Twenty halved oil barrels that serve as planters represent the culture of big oil and reconnect the petroleum product with the earth. The barrels also receives roof water from an adjacent building which is fed through the planter to a downspout that flows onto an upended oil barrel, beating the drum during rainy days. The installation relates to shifting attitudes about energy, consumption, and stormwater management.

Simpson also created Host Analog, the slowly-decaying log installation outside the Oregon Convention Center.

Jeffrey Weston Rose

Our next Weston rose is the Jeffrey Weston Rose, on the old Portland Bottling Co. Building in the 1300 block of NE Couch. Going by the name this is probably another one named for a family member, but that's all I know.

Tiffany Weston Rose, Sandy Plaza

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour is the Tiffany Weston Rose, on the Art Deco Sandy Plaza Building at NE 18th & Sandy. This is the second rose named after the owner/developer's daughter, the first being the circa-1994 Tiffany Weston Rose on the Tiffany Center in downtown Portland.

Flowering Legacy of the Civil Rights Leaders

The next mural on our ongoing tour is Flowering Legacy of the Civil Rights Leaders, in the Brooklyn neighborhood on SE 13th at Powell. The RACC description:

The mural project was made by students from the Oregon Leadership Institute at Portland State University. It features a Portland Rose with petals showing the faces of civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, Chief Joseph, Ceasar Chavez, and Mahatma Ghandi. Other images of freedom are also included in the mural.

To be perfectly honest, the faces-growing-out-of-roses thing looks a bit like a mad science experiment gone awry. I'm sure they meant well, though.

The winged figure on the left appears to be the statue atop the Victory Column in Berlin, a 19th century German war memorial. I imagine it's here as an "image of freedom" because a.) the column's located near the Brandenburg Gate, where the Berlin Wall once stood, and b.) Brooklyn was once a German immigrant neighborhood. At one time it even had streets with names like "Bismarck", although most of them were hastily renamed during World War I.

A Neighborhood in Motion

The next mural on our tour is another "celebrate our neighborhood" design: A Neighborhood in Motion is in the Roseway neighborhood, at the fun six-way intersection of 72nd, Sandy, and Fremont. The mural's on the 72nd Ave. side of the Missing Link bike shop. This area may sound kind of familiar if you've been reading this blog for a while, since we've been here couple of times before on other quixotic wild goose chases, I mean, projects. The first time was in 2008 for the Roseway Parkway, the wide sorta-Park Blocks down the middle of 72nd north of Sandy. A couple of the photos above were taken from the parkway blocks, in fact. More recently, last May I stopped by for photos of the untitled Lee Kelly sculpture at the US Bank branch across the intersection at 72nd & Fremont, as well as the nearby painted intersection at 77th & Beech. For what it's worth, I've also been to the nearby Roseway Theater a few times, albeit without writing about it. Unfortunately I wasn't looking for murals on these previous visits, so I didn't clue in on this one, even though it takes up the entire side of a building. So I had to make another trip back, and I can't decide whether I'm being extremely thorough or extremely inefficient. If I ever decide to start a project on historic buildings, I'll probably have to make yet another trip here.

Anyway, the the RACC description of the mural has this to say:

This mural reflects the surrounding community, brought together by the mural process. A winding road with trucks and cars, a barbershop, grocers, soda jerk, war time workers, and unicyclist are among the many neighborhood images shown.

The website of one of the artists has more closeups of the mural. As I mentioned in another recent mural post, the drug store across the street still has a working soda fountain. I'm not sure why I keep mentioning that, other than that it's an odd anachronism that's somehow survived into the 21st century. But then, a couple of downtown Portland buildings still have manual elevators, and they employ people to operate them. Or at least they did as recently as 2012.

Mary Stephens Rose

The next Weston rose we're looking at is the Mary Stephens Rose, on the side of an otherwise nondescript building in the 2000 block of NE Broadway. I'm not sure who this rose is named for, which makes for a very short blog post this time around.

SE 45th & Henderson

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One of the more dubious ongoing projects here at this humble blog involves tracking down places on a weird list I ran across in the city archives. Some of these places are obscure city parks, while others are various landscaped bits that the parks bureau had a hand in designing or maintaining at one time. And then there are a few that I can't quite figure out, like today's installment. We're on SE Henderson St. at 45th Avenue, on a hillside a bit east of the swanky Eastmoreland neighborhood. The city's official neighborhood map says we're in a long, skinny part of the Woodstock neighborhood, between Eastmoreland and the far less upscale Brentwood-Darlington area. I'm describing this at length because this whole area was a blank spot on my mental map of the city, and I'm fairly sure I'd never been here before I came looking for the subject of this post.

The aforementioned hillside is the reason we're here, as it turns out; when the houses along this stretch of Henderson were built, the developers put a divider down the middle of the street such that the westbound lane is maybe 3-5 feet above the eastbound lane. I suppose this way yards and driveways on either side of the street don't have to be as steep. As far as I can tell, the divider is the reason this street is on the list. The divider is just solid concrete, without any landscaping or anything decorative, so I'm not sure what the Parks Bureau would have had to do with the place, but the list says they were involved somehow, so I went to take a look. An imaginative and unsupervised child could probably find something fun to do here, but calling it a park would be a real stretch. Maybe the bureau shrugged and said they couldn't work with this place, or they came back with a budget-busting landscaping plan that wasn't adopted, or something like that. I suppose that would still count as "involvement", if you defined the word broadly enough.

Araminta

If you drive or ride along NE Sandy at night, you might have noticed the tall glowing spiky thing in front of the old fire station at 56th Ave. Portland fire stations often have a bit of public art on display, often thanks to "1% For Art" money from when stations receive seismic upgrades. I'm not sure whether that was the case here. In any event, today's post pays a visit to Araminta - Carrying People to Safety by James M. Harrison. The RACC description:

Araminta was Harriet Tubman's given name at birth. The piece is designed to be a light beacon and to inspire our better nature -- to remind us that we should be strong rather than fearful in moments of crisis.

I'm not sure I'm sold on how Harriet Tubman, firefighting, and abstract art are all interconnected, but hey.

Bell Circles II

A couple of earlier posts here talked about the pair of bells in front of the Oregon Convention Center, donated by Portland's sister cities of Sapporo, Japan, and Ulsan, South Korea. I mentioned there was also an acoustic art installation connected to the bells: Bell Circles II is an automated system that rings the bells every so often. Signs simply say the bells ring without warning, but they allegedly operate on a set schedule. Supposedly the Sapporo bell rings hourly, while the Ulsan bell rings on a schedule that evolves over time and resets on each solstice and equinox.. I say "allegedly" and "supposedly" because I was at the Convention Center recently and I had the idea of filming the Sapporo bell ringing. I'd checked YouTube and couldn't find any video of either of the bells ringing, so it seemed like this would fill an important cultural gap or something. So I started filming just before the top of the hour, and kept filming for four minutes, and came away with a boring video of the bell just sitting there, doing nothing. Later it occurred to me that "hourly" doesn't necessarily mean "at the top of the hour". Still, I feel like I've made a good faith effort to record the bell doing its thing, and I don't really feel like going back and hanging around for an hour or more to see if it ever actually rings. So I'm just going to go with the video clip I already have, and imagine that the bell's playing a famous John Cage piece. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Solar Flare

The next mural on our ongoing tour is on SE Ankeny, right next to the Giant Snail mural we just saw, and it may or may not be titled Solar Flare. It's hard to be sure because even though it's a recent mural, the artist's website is down (and Archive.org doesn't have it), and the Twitter handle listed on the mural seems to belong to someone else entirely. I did run across a Facebook profile of an artist with the right name, but I don't know if it's the same person or not. In short, I don't know a lot about this one.

I actually didn't realize this was a separate mural at first, and somehow only got one photo showing this part of the wall the first time I visited. So I had to make a special trip back to get a few photos of this mural. Well, this and a sort of graffiti skeleton design on a nearby garage, which seems to have been painted over already. I've gotten used to that. Unlike traditional public art, which in theory sticks around forever, off the top of my head I only know of a handful of murals that have been around longer than a decade. Before the early 1990s there weren't a lot of them to begin with, and generally speaking they're more likely to be painted over than restored. Sometimes a mural's host building is demolished, and I've never heard of a mural being salvaged when a building here is torn down. That's happened before in New York, or maybe it was in the UK somewhere; a doomed building was home to a Banksy, so when the building was leveled, the mural was rescued at the behest of a well-heeled art collector, or maybe it was an art dealer. I'm hazy on some of the details, but in any case we have no (known) Banksys here, nor has any local street artist achieved that same level of global fame, so when a building goes, anything painted on it goes too.

Melvin Weston Rose

The next Weston rose on our mini-tour of Weston roses is the Melvin Weston Rose, located on the big U-Store self-storage complex next to I-84, just east of the 28th Ave. overpass. These photos were taken from the overpass, and I'm not really sure where else you can get a good look at this rose, as large as it is. Maybe from a moving vehicle on the freeway, and maybe if you're right up next to it in the middle of the storage complex. I'm not sure who this rose is named for, but I imagine it's a family member, just going by the name.

A Vintage Portland post explains that this complex was once home to the Doernbecher Furniture manufacturing plant. (In fact there's a Doernbecher Rose elsewhere on the building, but I think it's only visible from I-84/MAX, and I don't have photos of it yet.) Wood for the plant came from the company's own sawmill, which was located at Coalca Landing, at the Willamette Narrows south of Oregon City. The site is now an obscure state park, with river access, some concrete ruins from the old sawmill, and views of the once-famous Coalca Pillar, Oregon's vey own balancing rock. The park is worth a visit, if you can find it (and my post about the place explains how).

Giant Snail mural, SE Ankeny

The next mural on our ongoing tour is a Giant Snail mural by Hunter Armstrong, located on SE Ankeny between 22nd & 24th. Strictly speaking it's on the back of a building that faces Burnside, but you can only see it from Ankeny. It's one of two large and brightly colored murals at this spot, the other being Solar Flare, about which a post is coming. Wiredforsound23 (whose Flickr photos lead me to a lot of murals I wouldn't know about otherwise) calls this one At a Snail's Pace, but the artist doesn't seem to use that name on his own photos of it, so I dunno. In any case, here's a short video of the snail mural being painted, if you're curious how these things come together.

When I stopped by to take these photos, a couple of guys with leafblowers were clearing the parking lot in front of the murals. They seemed confused and a little suspicious of this random guy walking up with a camera taking photos. I tried to reassure them that I was just taking photos of the murals and not of them, and explained I ran a website about art and assorted Portland stuff, which is more or less what this blog is about right now. I think that upgraded me from suspicious to merely weird in their eyes because they went back to blowing leaves. Later I made sure I didn't have any identifying photos of the guys, since I have no desire to get anyone deported. Not even leafblower guys, as much as I hate leafblowers.

Douglas Building Roses

A number of recent posts here have been about Weston roses, which are paintings (or sometimes printed photos) of roses on buildings owned by a local real estate tycoon. (See this earlier post for more backstory, if you're curious.) If you've been reading these, you might have noticed I keep linking to the Portland Roses Tumblr, which is someone's site about paintings of roses around Portland and sometimes further afield. The lion's share of posts are about Weston roses, but the genre isn't completely monopolized by one rich guy. This post is about one of the exceptions.

The historic Douglas Building, at SE 35th & Hawthorne, is home to a pair of semi-abstract roses. As far as I know, they only appear on the Portland Roses Google Map & didn't merit Tumblr posts of their own, which made them harder to find when I went looking for them. I only have photos of the rose on the west side of the building, facing 35th; the other one is on the east side of the building, and as I recall it looks identical to this one. There's also a similar pair of roses on another building further east at 48th & Hawthorne, but that's a separate post. Because rules or something.