Peter Kohler (Art) Pavilion

A new, minor art museum has opened in Portland, revealing a permanent collection of over 100 artworks from the closets of Portland’s wealthy and generous.

It’s part of the Peter Kohler Pavilion at OHSU, a new 14 story biomedical research facility perched at the top of Marquam Hill, and the top-side of Portland’s new aerial tram. Kohler is the hospital’s longtime president. The tram is Portland’s largest, most expensive public artwork.

Soon you’ll be able to ride the tram for $5 to visit the artwork, but there’s plenty of free parking in the new lot under the building (take a left on Campus Drive as you approach the hospital campus on Sam Jackson Park, park and take the elevator to the 9th floor).

Much of the artwork comes from donations by members of the OHSU Foundation, a club of Portland’s wealthy and powerful. Members of the Foundation include

• Chairman Frank Jungers, former CEO and Chairman Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO)
• Former Chair Richard Geary President of Kiewit Pacific, a major contractor building the tram.
• Wayne Drinkward, President and CEO of Hoffman Construction Company, a major builder of the South Waterfront at OHSU
• Arlene and Mina Schnitzer – longtime philanthropists and art lovers

The full list of Foundation officers, board members and trustees is here.

The artwork is squirreled all over the 9th and and 7th floors, and perhaps elsewhere in the building. Explore hallways and even offices to seem them all, weekends are best. There are outdoor sculpture areas on both floors with fantastic views of the city and the tram, showing artwork like the kitchy Sophie Ryder Standing Lady Hare with Dog – which she’s remade and sold many times. But it really works here, strong arms and strong backside gently holding the sick dog.

Many contributions come from the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Collection – including prints and paintings from local gallery artists Sherrie Wolf, Henk Pander, Julie Rall, Karen Guzak, Lucinda Parker, Laverne Kraus, Suzanne Duryea, and Shirley Gittelsohn.

The Ryder sculpture shown here was donated by Ken Novack, who happens to be the President of Schnitzer Steel. Just one of them tho. The top one.

Over the next several days, Portland Public Art will look at these artworks, and some of the artists who made them.

OHSU has a library of the artworks; but the links are duds or lead to enormous, pointless tiff files.

Speaking of bad pics – here’s a prediction: within ten years you’ll be able to weave a Google Earth-type program with all the Flickr + Google Images to create a comprehensive picture of everything in the world.

 

Porfirio DiDonna at Lewis & Clark

“I must start to paint. Too much thinking and writing will get me nowhere.” Porfirio DiDonna.

First glance at this late color field painting, hanging in a small college stairwell in 2006, the skeptical tourist might think, “acoustic panel?” Or, “did the paint slip off?” Or, “Hmmm” and keep hoofing toward the next place to be.

The moment, the confluence of sensual ego art with academic Art Forum theory, is hard to imagine once dominating the art market – more to explain!

Quickly – this is the only hanging Porfirio DiDonna in Oregon, at the Fred W Fields Center for the Visual Arts at Lewis & Clark College in SW Portland, a gift of Martin Schmukler, a NYC criminal defense attorney – not an alum. DiDonna, born & died in Brooklyn, 1942-1986, repped by the Nielson Gallery in NYC. Died unexpectedly, a brain tumor. Well, who plans these things?

Here’s the review you dreamed they would write for you, from the NY Times, 1973, review of a group show at OK Harris, “The most prepossessing and certainly the most peculiar of these painters as Porfirio DiDonna who covers his canvases with minute dots of color spaced at intervals in a grid of horizontal lines. The canvases are white or gray, the lines are usually in pencil and the dots of one or more pale colors. DiDonna’s art qualifies, for me, a Color Field because, from a distance, the dots melt into an effect of faint over-all shimmer. Close-up, however, it is rather Spartan. There is a handmade roughness and irregularity to the execution and deployment of the dots, which, by their nature, suggest some kind of rational system, though none is apparent.”

“DiDonna’s work is like no one else’s I can think of. Its mixture of elegance, austerity and quirky casualness seems wholly original, and it’s a pleasure.”

Wow. Huh. Let me look at that again. But go ahead and Google DiDonna and see all the wild human sexy Italian paintings he made prior to converting to the color field nonsense late in life. It’s unlikely the art Pioneers ambling by know what this picture is – both the artist and donors names are mislabeled.

For more on color field – again the skeptical tourist – see Tom Wolfe’s short text, The Painted Word.

More DiDonna – Essay by Addison Parks and Artforum, December 1994

 

Louis Bunce at PDX

This fantastic 1958 Louis Bunce (1907 – 1983) painting has blithly hung in the Portland International Airport mall for decades – which is actually not a bad place to kill time.

About 25 x 35, it’s not currently well lit and is set, as you can see, above the entrance to a Coffee People. (Is that part of the lease agreement? The decoration is worth more than the annual revenue!)

Cool! This site reviews airports and mentions the Bunce, as well as artworks by Jack Portland, Larry Kirkland and Pete Beeman.

Bunce gave a long interview to Rachel Rosenfield Lafo in 1982. Very interesting.

Bunce showed at the Heller and Meltzer galleries in NYC during the 1950s. His catalogue keeps going and is repped by Laura Russo Gallery. His work is in dozens of collections all over the world. He traveled the world too – meeting the great poets and artists of the day.

And then he came back to Portland.

When you look at this painting its important to remember Portland in the late fifties was a rough, blue collar town with no galleries, no night life, where the museum was run by the Arlington Club fellows, where the news was manufactured by lumber lobbyists and where the cops + politicans were if not crooked, certainly looking the other way.

It takes both a certain kind of courage and a certain kinds of dedication to remain in the provinces. A small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond? Who shall I be? But for Portland this wasn’t the right question. There were no fish and this wasn’t even a pond at all. What did his neighbors think? My his mother must have worried!

 

Portland’s Unsecret Tragedy

Heroin has plagued in Portland for generations. Stigma, confusion and cost lay before the various solvers of this problem: county bureaucrats shuffled their feet and ponder early retirement if confronted with facts, treatment providers point fingers, civic leaders shield themselves with platitudes.

Yet humans have pointlessly died in Portland – thousands of them. Most went without sufficient medical intervention. Many end up in jail, prison, the madhouse, cycling through ineffective treatment centers and expensive hospitalizations.

Often by the end, junkies don’t really care if they are alive or dead. They’re cursed and know it.

Just off NE Broadway near the Memorial Coliseum is one family’s memory of their daughter, Jo-Lyn Rose who died in 1995.

Roses – our city’s emblem – rise from the left and create an arc of life, struck in the prime by lightening bolts. Then under gray rain clouds the blooms wilt and die. There is a tombstone, etc. Bleak.

Just after the mural was created I corresponded with one of the family members – I can’t quite remember, perhaps her mother. She was devastated, defeated, and perfectly aware her daughter had largely been abandoned by a complicated professional system of caretakers. She was sad, but also had resigned her daughters’ fate long before it occurred, withdrawing a safe distance to watch the slow motion disaster of her daughter’s death.

Of course it doesn’t have to happen. Actually Portland has one of the world’s best responses to heroin addiction – and addicts are eager to sign up. If they can get in the door. Independent assessment of the program’s success has been circulated for years. It’s been written about in the Oregonian extensively (Redemption Man – Clean For Real, the story of David Fitzgerald’s 12th Step is well worth reading). The program is managed by a thoughtful and respected agency.

People don’t have to die from heroin addiction in Portland. So the platitudes & shuffling as inexcusable as the long waits for treatment.

What’s utterly failed is leadership from Multnomah County’s Commissioners and executive healthcare management to fund this program.

Read about Central City Concern’s addiction programs.

You want evidence? There’s plenty. First – no one does this alone. See program evaluation from the CCC Mentor Program. Effective abstinance-based outpatient treatment is also well-documented. Finally, people places and things needs to change, and alcohol and drug free housing make that possible.

Without all three of these programs – it doesn’t work. Without sufficient funding – it doesn’t work.

But if you’re shooting dope and want to stop, or know someone else who is and does, this is the place to do whatever it takes to stop.

 

Bank art – left behind, forgotten?

What will protect this mural?

This public artwork is located on the South face of the American State Bank on Martin Luther King Blvd and about Knott Street, in NE Portland.

A rare insight from a writer with the Portland Mercury describes the ACB interior in 2000. Formerly Albina Community Bank – I think – this building is currently empty and out of business. According to the Metro Murals database of Portland’s mural artwork (our city’s most accessable public arts database! Whew!) it was made by Paul Gilbert in 1999, and is 8′ by 25′, 200 square feet.

I haven’t discovered much about the muralist Paul Gilbert. I think the mural was made at the same time as the adjoining Gladys Sims McCoy Memorial Park was created to recognize McCoy, former Multnomah County Chair and longtime civic leader. The park was built by the neighboring American State Bank.

It uses a flat naive’ style with a rollercoaster perspective to show a banker welcoming customers and a band playing in a park. It’s got that content-by-committee feel to it. It’s nice, but bland and unremarkable.

The question of maintainance comes if two criteria are met – and I am not sure they are in the case of this nameless mural. With the bank closed and the building for sale or lease, the artwork does not have an internal protector. So does the community love it, cherish it, need it, remember with it, value it sufficiently to make it a unspoken requirement of owning it (possessing it along with the building)? I don’t get a sense of this. The McCoy Memorial, I assume, has the protection of both the McCoy family and the county or city, but this mural, both a extravagent commercial remainder and a reminder of the Albina boosters who launched the Albina Community Plan (see below). And then the harder question, does it qualify as art, a thing by its sheer creation and existance sufficiently convincing to secure and protect as a community treasure?

No. I think this mural fails both questions, and will be lost in time to renovation. Sad? I don’t think so. That it’s surroundings are also dreck isn’t a sufficient argument, and there are far to many other public artworks of great value which need protection and care.

Gladys McCoy, Portland Public Schools Board member from 1966, County Commissioner form 1979, and County Chair from 1986. Gladys and her husband Bill (a state legislator) also are remembered with McCoy Park on N. Woolsey and the McCoy Community Garden on Fessenden.

The Albina Community Plan was as much a process as a plan, a process to capture the acceptance of a community to rennovation. (All of the following documents are pdfs and slow-loading.)

See History of Portland’s African American Community (1805 to 1993).

See History of the Albina Plan Area.

See Albina Community Plan Process – 1990

See Albina Community Plan Design Guidelines – 1993