Portlandia arrives in Portland (Joel Davis, The Oregonian)

“Statue-watching is apparently a dead art. At least in Portland.” So declared The Oregonian in 1965. But times change. Now Portlanders and visitors alike love to gaze upon the city’s many striking public sculptures. For most of us, however, the works’ history is a mystery. Well, it’s time for that to change, too, because the stories behind the art can be as memorable as the pieces themselves.

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Photos: The Oregonian

Ode to Joy

In 1990, suddenly, there was no “Joy” in Council Crest Park. One night in the middle of summer, Frederic Littman’s beloved bronze sculpture of a woman playfully swinging a child in her outstretched arms was sawed off at the feet and dragged away. “The first thing that comes to mind is a prank,” a police spokesman said. The statue, overlooking the Tualatin River valley and widely known as “Ode to Joy,” was dedicated by the city in 1956 and quickly became iconic in the neighborhood. “I had great freedom with that work,” Littman said a few years after completing it. “Government projects are usually made under rather confining specifications, but that one was unrestricted.” Littman, who claimed he worked with metal because he liked to “fight gravity,” taught art at Reed College, the Portland Art Museum and Portland State University. He died in 1979. A couple of days after the sculpture’s theft, an anonymous call led police to the basement of a Northeast Portland house, where the sculpture had been dumped. It was soon restored to its place in Council Crest Park with the assistance of sculptor Manuel Izquierdo.

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Kvinneakt

Norman Taylor’s 1975 bronze nude stands on SW 6th Street downtown. The work, The Oregonian wrote shortly after it was unveiled, “has a way of making some people do a double-take to make sure of what they think they're seeing.” Jeff Kuechle, writing for the newspaper in 1985, didn’t consider that a good thing. “This is Bud Clark’s ‘Expose Yourself to Art’ lady,” he wrote. “She is unusual because she is one of Portland’s few nude artworks. As a work of art, however, she seems to arouse feelings ranging from neutral to negative.” Seconded Claire Kelly, then director of Portland State’s art and architecture program: “She’s more than simplistic, she’s absurd. It’s not a piece that belongs on public display.”

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The Lovejoy columns

"People who venture under the commercial Lovejoy Street ramp at NW 12th Avenue in Portland have been intrigued by the unusual drawings on the pillars supporting the ramp," The Oregonian wrote in 1962, adding the artist "has left his mark on Portland." The street art, created in the 1940s and '50s by railway watchman Tom Stefopoulos, became a secret favorite of Portlanders, though one of his pieces -- a portrait of Gen. Douglas MacArthur -- was defaced. The unusual art display faced the possibility of complete obliteration in the 1990s when the city decided to raze the Lovejoy Street ramp to open up what has become the Pearl District. But preservationists managed to save two of the original columns with Stefopulous' work, and they are now installed in a small plaza on NW 10th Avenue between Everett and Flanders streets.

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Sherry Kaskey (The Oregonian)

Portlandia

Raymond Kaskey’s 38-foot-tall Portlandia, which hovers over the Portland Building’s entrance, was hailed upon its 1985 unveiling as a symbol of “sea commerce and trade.” It was also heralded as “the Madonna of Portland sculpture” -- meaning the pop star, not the Virgin Mary. In Portlandia’s early days, it seemed, the massive work could be anything a viewer wanted it to be. Unless, that is, you had ever bumped into Sherry Kaskey in Washington, D.C., where the artist’s wife and her husband lived. Sherry’s face served as the model for the figure. “It was natural [for him] to use me,” she said with a shrug. But she admitted that early in the creative process Ray had trouble with the countenance. A visitor to the Kaskey house surveyed the work-in-progress and told the artist, “I know who that is. It’s Walter Mondale!”

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Van Sant's mural isn't technically public art, but it's been available to the public for decades. (Michael Russell/Oregonian)

The Macheezmo mural

Gus Van Sant is a Portland filmmaking icon. But the Oscar-nominated director of "Good Will Hunting" and "Milk" also knows how to use a paintbrush. In fact, he studied not at USC's cinema school but at the esteemed Rhode Island School of Design. Back in the early 1980s, the not-yet-famous filmmaker painted murals for a local, now-long-gone Mexican-food chain called Macheezmo Mouse. For years, the murals were considered lost -- painted over by subsequent tenants -- but in 2013, The Oregonian restaurant critic Michael Russell discovered that at least one still survived, in plain sight, in Chez Machin at 3553 SE Hawthorne Blvd. "Walk in and ask for a seat in the back," Russell instructed. "There, past the kitchen and its busy griddles, up a short flight of stairs, you'll find one of Van Sant's murals painted directly onto a beige wall partly obscured by a pair of metal support beams. With a palette of pale yellow and sky blue, the mural includes a floating sombrero sun, an off-kilter cactus, a jagged mountain range and road and a lasso roping a guitar." It's an arresting Southwestern scene, to be sure. It may seem a bit out of place in a creperie, but, considering its pleasing aesthetic and celebrity provenance, it's a perfect complement to any Portlander's brunch.

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Joan of Arc

She's unknown to most tourists and often overlooked by locals as well, seeing as she's not downtown but tucked away in the Laurelhurst neighborhood. But when the sun is shining, her gold breastplate shimmers brilliantly, making the Joan of Arc at NE Glisan Street and Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard the most striking piece of public art in the city. What, you might wonder, is 15th-century France's teenaged "Maid of Orleans" doing in Portland? During a visit to Paris in the early 1900s, prominent Portland doctor Henry Waldo Coe was struck by Emmanuel Fremiet's statue at the Place des Pyramides. Coe ultimately decided to have a version made for the Rose City, in honor of the American soldiers who fought in France during World War I. Portland's Joan, dedicated in 1925, was made from the same molds as the one in the City of Lights. By the 1960s, the traffic circle where the statue stood had fallen out of favor and some neighborhood planners aimed for its removal. But art stalwarts prevailed. "We should not ignore the fact that cities were created for people," declared one Joan supporter, "and not as accommodations for machines, and particularly not to be surrendered to automobiles while the cultural and artistic aspects are obscured or destroyed."

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Dreamer

Manuel Izquierdo's work can be found all over Portland, including at Reed College and Portland State University. Perhaps his most beloved piece is this 1979 bronze sculpture in Pettygrove Park (the Madrid-born artist is pictured here in front of his work). Jeff Kuechle, writing in The Oregonian, called it the "true highlight of Portland's public sculpture, hidden away in a lovely forested glade in the office/condominium district south of the Civic Auditorium." He added that "its vaguely feminine contours project a sort of organic mood -- human in origin but somehow, well, different." The Oregon Encyclopedia described the 14-foot piece as "a flowing, abstract form poised on a geometric base sited in a pool of water. Organic and voluptuous, it is a modern river goddess. Izquierdo's faultlessly drop-welded seams (internal to the work and thus invisible) give the piece a taut clarity despite its sensuousness." Said local artist George Johanson after Izquierdo's death in 2009: "He did what real artists are supposed to do. Which was to discover and develop himself in relation to the world, and create something unique."

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Elk Fountain

You might think the Elk Fountain that stands in the middle of Main Street downtown is an ode to Portlanders’ love of nature and wildlife. Not quite. A city report in 1900 declared that the $20,000 statue and fountain represented “the conquest over wild nature by the forces of civilization.” The work was a gift of David P. Thompson, a former Idaho Territory governor and Portland mayor. Thompson’s inspiration for the Elk: “From my office window,” he wrote, “I have an opportunity to see the great benefit the Skidmore Fountain is to Portland, by furnishing water for the dumb animals and birds, to quench their thirst, as well as the great number of human beings who also drink of the pure water which flows from this fountain.” The piece is now iconic, reproduced on posters and postcards, but early on not everyone was enthusiastic. The city invited the local Elks Lodge to officiate at the 1900 dedication but the group refused, referring to Thompson’s Elk as “a monstrosity of art.”

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Final adjustments during the sculpture's installation (The Oregonian)

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The colorful sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum, created by the late Pop Art pioneer Roy Lichtenstein, is one of the city’s newer public-art installations. It’s a somewhat unusual work for the artist, who tended to shy away from large, heroic offerings in favor of more everyday-sized pieces. In other ways, however, the three-dimensional take on painting is typical Lichtenstein. The work “represents one of the ways in which Pop Art set itself in opposition to Abstract Expressionism,” Brown University wrote. Lichtenstein is perhaps best known for his comics-inspired aesthetic, such as 1963’s “Drowning Girl” and his famed 1968 Time magazine cover image of Robert F. Kennedy.

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Rebecca at the Well

The South Park Blocks sculpture of the biblical figure who gives water to a stranger has been called “perhaps the least known of Portland statues.” It’s often been misrepresented, too, including by The Oregonian. “Old clippings attribute the bronze statue in the Shemanski Fountain to Avard Fairbanks, one-time dean of applied arts at the University of Oregon,” the newspaper’s John Painter Jr. wrote in 1965. “Tain’t so, though. Sculptor Oliver L. Barrett really did the job and signed the base of the maid to prove it.” In 2007, vandals knocked the 1926 sculpture off its base, requiring a $10,000 repair. A year later, three brass nozzles from the fountain were stolen. Said a city spokesman: “Our patience is really being tested.”

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Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider

Alxander Phimister Procter isn't widely known today. But back in the early years of the 20th century, he was a famous artist, winning honors and accolades aplenty. So when Portland doctor Henry Waldo Coe decided to give the city a statue of President Theodore Roosevelt, who happened to be a hunting pal of Coe's, Proctor was an obvious choice. The $40,000 1922 bronze, showing Roosevelt in a heroic pose during the Spanish-American War, stands in the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland. To Coe, his close friend represented what all of us -- individually and as a country -- could accomplish if we put our minds to it. Reads the plaque on the statue: "He was frail; he made himself a tower of strength. He was timid; he made himself a tower of courage. He was a dreamer; he became one of the great doers of all time."

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Harvey W. Scott

A statue of a newspaperman? President Donald Trump certainly would not approve. And this bronze work, which looms atop Mt. Tabor, was created by Gutzon Borglum, who’s best known for creating the Mount Rushmore presidents. Portland’s Borglum piece, dedicated in 1933, is further proof that Borglum liked to think big: the longtime editor of The Oregonian is 11 feet tall here -- and stands atop an 8-foot base. The figure, with an extended arm and finger pointing west, has the stance and look of a radical politician, but of course he wasn’t. As the statue’s plaque states, he was a mere “Molder of Opinion.”

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Spanish-American War Memorial

Soaring above Lownsdale Square in downtown Portland is a gun-toting soldier, so high up that many Portlanders strolling in the park don’t even notice him. The statue was dedicated on Memorial Day in 1906, though the stone legend on its base bears a 1904 date. (The sculptor Douglas Tilden apparently fell behind schedule.) The work, which heralds the bravery of the men of the Second Oregon volunteer infantry, was met with enthusiasm, with The Oregonian declaring that “an ocean of humanity” turned out for the dedication ceremony. “The figure seemed to breathe and move,” the paper wrote. “The face was thin and full of courage.” The Oregonian’s editor, Harvey W. Scott, had spearheaded the fundraising for the monument, calling for “a daily reminder through all coming years of the gallant devotion and unselfish patriotism of the young men of Oregon who sprang to the front at their country’s call.”

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Pioneer Courthouse Square tiles

Portland artist Gail Mitchell Martin created the 53 charming bronze tiles showcasing local history that were installed at Pioneer Courthouse Square in 1984. But though she put in weeks of library research (followed by months of work on the tiles), two mistakes sneaked into the final product. One involved the depiction of the long-defunct Mt. Tabor trolley service. The other mistakenly stated that in 1932 President Franklin Roosevelt slept at the Portland Hotel, which stood where the square now is. The diligent artist, embarrassed, immediately set about fixing the errors.

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"Pod" being installed in 2002 (The Oregonian)

Pod

Kids love to push on the 30-foot-tall steel, titanium and bronze pendulum. So do adults. "It's both graceful and clumsy, fluid and bouncy," said its creator, Pete Beeman, when it was installed across from downtown’s Powell’s Books in 2002. Wrote Oregonian art critic D.K. Row: “It's a complex, funny piece that evokes the sumptuously heroic curves of sculptor Richard Serra and the consciously zany computerized designs of architect Frank Gehry.” OK, so it’s fun and complex, but what does it represent? Beeman said the legs are “the supporting infrastructure of Portland.” The center pendulum is a reference to the city’s vibrancy. Most of all, he said, it’s the passers-by who swing and push on it that give the work its meaning.

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Hardy at work on "Running Horses" (The Oregonian)

Running Horses

Tom Hardy’s swooping work, installed at Pioneer Square in the 1980s, was one of his favorites. “I think animals are more interesting than people,” the late artist told Portland academic Eugene Snyder. “I mean, there’s more variation, more decorative forms ... I like animals and their shapes as starting points, but I like to think a piece of sculpture is more important than simply a replica of the animal. It’s a question of shapes, surfaces, planes, all interrelating.” But while Hardy regularly evoked wildlife in his work, his means of creating it was distinctly industrial. “You can go down to the shipyard and see all the techniques I use,” he once said. “Someone once showed me how to weld. Took about an hour to learn all I need to know. I can lay a straight bead, as welders say, but I doubt that I could get a union card.”

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Skidmore Fountain

The fountain, the granddaddy of Portland public art, was unveiled in 1888 at NW First and Ankeny. For years, various city boosters and leaders sought to move sculptor Olin Warner’s creation to various, “more frequented” locations, including the South Park Blocks near the Portland Art Museum. Throughout these relocation attempts, one thing remained the same: the high regard with which the fountain was held. In 1941, when yet another effort was initiated to move the fountain -- this time to the downtown park along the waterfront -- it was heralded as “Portland’s finest work of art.” Finally, opinion came around to the idea that it really did belong right where it was. Offered Stewart Buttner, head of Lewis and Clark College’s fine arts department, in 1985: “It’s a fine integration of art and architecture. Look at the way the fountain fits in with the buildings around it. That’s the way art and architecture should fit together.”

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Abraham Lincoln

The 1926 bronze sculpture by George Waters eschewed the heroic poses that were typical of presidential monuments, capturing instead the 16th president’s introspection and melancholy. “With shoulders drooped below a bowed head,” wrote The Oregonian, “he seems burdened, and terribly human.” The statue in the South Park Blocks was another gift from Portland benefactor Dr. Henry Waldo Coe. He secured a promise from Waters “that it would never be duplicated, that this vision of Lincoln would be Portland’s own.” Coe died shortly before the 1928 dedication.

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Tikitotemoniki

Kenny Scharf's colorful, 30-foot-tall enamel-on-aluminum totems stand in and around Jameson Square in the Pearl District. In 2001 Art in America magazine declared them among the year's best public art. The artist describes his purpose and vision thusly: "Every project I undertake is building on my past experiences. My original approach is unchanged; it is a personal challenge to produce the best work possible every time. One very important and guiding principle to my work is to reach out beyond the elitist boundaries of fine art and connect to popular culture through my art."

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Thomas Jefferson

Karl Bitter’s bronze statue at Jefferson High School inevitably became just a part of the scenery to students, but it was a very big deal back when it was unveiled a hundred years ago. “Jefferson Statue Tenderly Unveiled,” The Oregonian headlined in May 1916. Some 1,800 “students and citizens” attended the dedication, with loud cheers erupting when an American flag was lifted from the figure. “This beautiful statue, just unveiled, not only exemplifies the loyalty of Jefferson students to their school, but it shows that they have caught from their studies here the right American spirit -- some of the patriotism which animated the fathers of the republic,” declared Judge M.G. Munly, chairman of the board of education. The high school’s students helped raise funds for the statue. The work is a replica of one at the Jefferson-founded University of Virginia.

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Littman at the 1975 dedication (The Oregonian)

Farewell to Orpheus

Frederic Littman’s bronze sculpture, floating above a reflecting pool in the South Park Blocks, features Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife, “as she is torn from him at the gates of Hades after he had charmed her back from the dead,” The Oregonian wrote. Sounds traumatizing. But Littman, at the work’s dedication in 1975, said he envisioned Portlanders lingering before the pool on pleasant summer days, enjoying the changing patterns of light and shadow “as the sun moves slowly around the sculpture and brings it to life.” The work is often overlooked by people walking through the park, which its fans consider a shame. Wrote The Oregonian 10 years after its installation: “Critics admire ‘Farewell to Orpheus’ for its deft juggling of classical theme with modern style.”

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The Benson Bubblers

Those elegant water fountains that burble in downtown Portland were a gift of Norway-born Oregon timber magnate Simon Benson, who in the early 1900s donated $10,000 to the city for their installation. The reason for his generosity: If a Portlander at the time was perambulating in the city “and wanted a drink, about the only place he could get it was a saloon.” Benson considered bars “parasites on legitimate industry” and believed most Portlanders, if they had the option, would take fresh water over beer. When his fountains debuted in 1912 he was able to claim he was right, with the Oregon Journal declaring the “Bubblers” an immediate success and insisting “Portlanders take 100,000 drinks daily from them.” In more recent years, The Oregonian wrote in 2015, the Water Bureau has struggled “to balance the city's penchant for conservation with the sheer beauty of the fountains.”

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Cat in Repose

Kathleen McCullough's 1977 Indiana limestone work, at Fifth and Morrison, "is one of the most celebrated sculptures along the Portland Transit Mall and is especially dear to children," the Public Art Archive states. McCullough's work often depicts animals; her work also can be found at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo.

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George Washington

As you’ve seen here, Theodore Roosevelt confidant Dr. Henry Waldo Coe gave the city’s some of its most memorable public art. One that is often overlooked, but shouldn’t be, is this 10-foot-tall Pompeo Coppini statue, dedicated in 1927 at NE 57th Avenue and Sandy Boulevard. Before it arrived in Portland, the statue celebrated the sesquicentennial in Philadelphia “under the guardianship of the Sons of the American Revolution.” It stood in front of the Liberal Arts Building at the exposition. Coe could not call the Father of the Country a hunting pal.

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Bonus: Theodore Roosevelt Memorial

Public art, even if made with sturdy stone, isn’t necessarily forever. One of Portland’s lost public-art masterpieces (or grotesque curiosities, depending on one’s artistic taste), is Oliver Barrett’s Roosevelt statue. In 1941, Portland booster E.C. Sammons suggested the city “do away” with the monument. And that’s exactly what happened, though it’s not clear if this happened on purpose or inadvertently. Here’s what The Oregonian wrote in 1983:

“When in February of ’39 [Barrett’s] work was unveiled in the Battleship Oregon Park on Harbor Drive [in what is now the Tom McCall Waterfront Park], the figure proved to be a massive, 14-foot-tall hunk of tufa, cubistically planed. What’s more, rather than the heroic president it purported to honor, it resembled no less an anti-hero than Mussolini. The timing, with the Axis war boiling toward our shores, couldn’t have been worse. ‘A monstrosity!’ the public roared. ‘A Frankenstein!’ The berated monster didn’t hang around long. In 1941, during the reconstruction of the marine park, it was found necessary to move him temporarily to warehouse quarters. Though it would seem hard to lose such a massive man-stone, it was the last the figure was ever heard of or seen.”

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Portlandia (The Oregonian)

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We certainly have not covered all of the public art there is to see in Portland. For starters, check out this guide to public art in the central city.

-- Douglas Perry