Just a list tonight, it’s cold out here in the darkness.

This little thing peeks out of the bushes in front of Baird. No tag, no nothing. I bet a dollar it’s a Arts & Crafts Society project a beloved Dean or Director made while in mid-life crisis. Prove me wrong. About two and a half feet high, bronze, late 1970’s by the style. Hmm. A cubist mother pushing a futurist baby stroller.

This astonishingly ugly half head sits in front of the Med Research building, on a marble dias with various icons etched into it, as if the thing were hurtling through space on an apology run to the gods, like Voyager’s gold record. It’s like a booby prize, probably selected by a committee of department heads as a perk for putting up with construction delays.

Across a small unused plaza is a long marble bench with Daniel Boorstin quippy qoute, “The obstacle to discovery is the illusion of knowledge.” Some sort of science no-mindfulness. More mid-life crisis, I bet. Students in scrubs are groggy, sucking down smokes, blinking at a forgotten sun.

I think I saw this is a casino lobby in Nevada a few years ago. The glass case is new. The Spirit of Healing has graced the BICC lobby since Peter Kohler hauled it home.

No idea who the artist is. Anyone?

Jack Van Koten, a Shriner and sculptor from Indiana made this guardian of the Portland Shriners Hospital, a 40-bed pediatric orthopaedic hospital providing comprehensive orthopaedic care to children at no charge.

Laugh if you want at the simplicity, but try to think of a better place for these duffers to be stacking their chips.

Antoinette Hatfield ran a prim and proper gallery downtown in the 1990s, I can’t put my finger on when she closed. Anyway, this bust of the archangel of OHSU welcomes visitors to an underused entrance of OHSU’s main hospital. Better is a bronze frieze + pictorial history of Hatfield in the main lobby.

He’s one of those well-cared for Washington men who looks better the older he gets. This bust looks like it was made from photos of him during the Nixon administration.

The Senator had a couple of bad falls last year and hasn’t had much of a public profile recently. At 83 years, and most of those in public, he’s on the verge of deification. Possibly the most popular Oregonian of all time, next to Ralph Miller and Mel Blanc.

There’s an old rusty Lee Kelly in front of the nursing school, and another shiny one in front of the VA. Both hidious. There’s a weird collection of nurse-dolls in the stairwell of the new nursing school. There is a surreal sculpture garden for kids to play in in the center of Doernbecher. That’s about it.


Finally, a simple plaque on a small boulder on a random walkway, “In the memory of those men and women who have advanced medical education and research through the bequest of their bodies to the School of Medicine, Oregon Health Sciences University.