Red, Yellow, Blue

Today's adventure in obscurity takes us to Red, Yellow, Blue, yet another item from the the Travel Portland art map, which describes it as "Mel Katz Red, Yellow, Blue 1990 cast concrete, linoleum". It's a small sculpture in front of the 200 Market building, aka the "Black Box". Longtime readers of this humble blog might remember Katz as the creator of Daddy Long Legs, on the Portland transit mall. Longtime Portlanders might know him better as a prominent local artist since time immemorial, or possibly as the ex-husband of former mayor Vera Katz. This is a fairly obscure piece of his, so there isn't much about it out on the interwebs, but I did come across one photo in a blog post about another Katz piece, in the lobby of a historic building in downtown Portland.

Red, Yellow, Blue sits right in front of one of the few remaining Kobos Coffee shops. I only took this one photo because the store was busy and I was kind of in the way. Also, I was juggling a camera, an umbrella, and a coffee (recommended, btw), and I was on my way to work, with a 9:15 meeting I couldn't get out of. So no weird close-up shots this time around, but hey.

If you're in the area, you might also be interested in Awning, another obscure sculpture over on the 3rd Avenue Mall side of the building. Pettygrove Park is a little urban oasis directly south of / behind the building. There are probably a few other things I've posted about that don't come to mind immediately. I'd really like to automate this sort of thing & just have a "Stuff Near Here" section at the bottom of each post that's generated on the fly based on blog posts' geotags. Blogger/Google hasn't gotten around to that, sadly, so I've been tinkering with writing my own in my oh-so-copious free time. So it's anyone's guess when (or if) that might be available.

tulips (gold)

tulips (violet)

tulips (orange)

daffodils, sw 5th & pine (ii)

daffodils, sw 5th & pine (i)

118 Modules

The latest obscure artwork in our ongoing tour of obscure things is 118 Modules, on the SW corner of the parking garage at SW 10th & Yamhill. It's yet another find from the big Travel Portland public art map. The map's description:

Smart Park, SW 10th & Yamhill
John Rogers 118 Modules
1979 slip-cast white stoneware

The RACC page about it has a bit more to say:

This is John Rogers’ first public art commission. He has since created numerous large-scale public art projects from Alaska to Florida. A Portland native, Rogers studied ceramics at Portland State University, and currently works with diverse materials such as metals, glass, ceramics, stone, cement, plastics, and light.

“I like to mix qualities found in the organic world with the technical world… My art relies on a firm understanding of the interplay between art, architecture and engineering. From these disciplines I develop sculptural forms that create a dialogue and tension with the architecturally defined space, as well as the surroundings.”

There are also Smithsonian art inventory & CultureNOW pages that don't add a lot. It also shows up in a big .CSV file cataloguing local public art, hosted on Github of all places. An interesting idea, anyway.

This is at least the third artwork I've posted about that was funded under the late, lamented, Comprehensive Education & Training Act (CETA), which I gather was a great big 1970's style unsupervised crockpot of federal money. The other two pieces (that I'm aware of) are Uroboros and Disk #4; I think 118 Modules is probably my favorite of the three, although Uroboros had an interesting, photogenic texture when you got up close to it.

So the question you're probably wondering now is whether there really are 118 modules or not. I did actually try counting & came up with fewer than that, but then I realized some of the modules are divided into halves, quarters, or even smaller fractions, and those pieces all probably count toward the total number of modules. At that point laziness kicked in and I shrugged & stopped counting. In my defense, I'm pretty sure that not knowing whether there really are 118 modules or not adds a sophisticated new layer of complexity to the piece. Also, counting the modules is sort of like tugging on Superman's cape: What if, hypothetically speaking, it turned out there were really only 115 modules? What then? An angry taxpayer lawsuit? A quiet renaming? The piece gets de-accessioned and goes up on eBay? Honestly, I have no idea how these things usually work, but it's bound to be ugly, so maybe we just shouldn't go there.

Urban Arrangements

Today's adventure in obscure-stuff-we-all-walk-by-every-day-without-noticing takes us to SW Yamhill outside Portland's downtown Nordstrom store, where Urban Arrangements adorns an otherwise blank brick wall. The big Travel Portland public art map describes it briefly:

Nordstrom, SW Yamhill btw Broadway & Park
Garth Edwards Urban Arrangements
1990 brushed stainless steel

The artist's website lists it along with another piece located at the Lloyd Center Nordstrom store, which I'm not familiar with. The site doesn't have photos of either one, although quite a few others are pictured, including a number of animal designs that I rather like. Anyway, that's pretty much all there is on the interwebs. The CultureNOW page for it is just a stub, and RACC has nothing about it, I suppose because it's probably owned by Nordstrom and thus not "public" in the sense of ownership.

Since I don't have anything else that's actually relevant to share, I'll go off on a tangent here and point you at the website of a different artist by the same name. At first I thought they were the same guy, which would make for a more interesting blog post since the second guy also claims to have invented a "Unified Field Theory", which would be the holy grail of modern physics, no artist since DaVinci has accomplished this sort of thing, etc., etc. The web design is also pretty great, assuming you miss GeoCities.