cyclotram

One of the long-running ongoing projects here at this humble blog involves tracking down local public art, taking a few photos, and writing about it. I deny having any particular expertise on the subject, but it's been a consistently interesting project, at least for myself, and hopefully for a few Gentle Reader(s) out there. I've run a bit low on new material within Portland city limits, so I've started looking at the 'burbs too. Recently I realized the city of Vancouver, WA has a small public art collection of its own, mostly concentrated in the city's small downtown. At some point -- I'm not sure when, exactly -- the city closed a block of E. 9th St. between Broadway & C St., and turned it into a sculpture garden featuring a number of mid-20th Century Portland-area artists. The thing that jumped out at me was that they had something by Manuel Izquierdo, whose work I'm usually a fan of (albeit in a non-expert fashion, as I keep pointing out). You can check out the blog's "izquierdo" tag for quite a few other examples.

So, with all that explanation out of the way, here's a slideshow of Spike Flower, at Vancouver's aforementioned Broadway St. sculpture garden. There isn't much about it on the net other than the city's art page, so we have to rely on the little sign next to the sculpture for info. The sign doesn't give the year Spike Flower was created, but notes it was donated to the city in 2001 by a local nonprofit, and includes a quote from Izquierdo:

The possibility that there is such an accurate mechanism in the creation of an object that expresses and amasses an unknown geometry of feelings, ideas, and aspirations, which are unclear at the very beginning of conception and are discovered through the process of creation, is one of the wonders of human endeavor. These human efforts are driven by a sublime need to reveal the spiritual reality which humans have experienced from the beginning of recorded time.

Our Ancestors left a record of their lives, their myths, and their gods painted and carved on cave walls and cliffs. These paintings and carvings show an immediate and revealing visual language which was created out of the pure need to communicate with other humans.

So I went out to the coast for a couple of days recently, and stayed at the hotel at Salishan, just south of Lincoln City. The hotel dates to 1965 and still has a swanky 60s feel to it, due in part to all the then-contemporary art scattered around the complex. The developer behind Salishan was John Gray, who also developed Sunriver south of Bend, Skamania Lodge in the Gorge, and parts of the Johns Landing area just south of downtown Portland. When not developing resorts, Gray was president of Omark Industries, a forest products equipment maker, and was also an avid patron of the arts, focusing exclusively on local artists. Hence the giant Lee Kelly sculpture outside the old Omark headquarters building on Macadam.

Now that you're up to speed on the background of the place: I'm sitting on the sofa in my hotel room, and I look up at the art on the wall right over me. It's a linocut print with a sort of circus theme, and I notice it's signed by Manuel Izquierdo. Izquierdo is best known as a sculptor (or at least he is to me), and I'm rather fond of his work, so I've tracked down a fair number of his creations around town. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one of his prints before, though, so I figured I ought to snap a couple of photos and, um, create a blog post around it. So this print is titled Above and Below, and is dated 1976. The Portland Art Museum has a copy as well, donated by the artist's estate in 2010, but it's not currently on view.

This post probably involved the least effort ever, on the photo end. All I had to do was roll over and get my phone and take a few photos, without ever getting off the sofa.

Here's a slideshow about Picador, the second Manuel Izquierdo sculpture outside the Portland Art Museum, on the Jefferson St. side of the building near Split Ring. Unlike Eye of Orion (the other Izquierdo), it doesn't appear that anyone's started a Doomsday cult about Picador yet, but then it's a relatively new acquisition and doesn't show up in a lot of Portland art guides, so it's possible any prospective cultists simply haven't found it yet. I had a bit of trouble figuring out what this was, actually. There doesn't seem to be a museum sign for it anywhere nearby. I ended up just guessing it was one of his and rifling through the museum's online collection to see if they had any photos that looked right.

Once I knew the title I still couldn't dig up a lot of info to share about this one. The search results are swamped with Spanish-language bullfighting links. Apparently there's another unrelated Manuel Izquierdo out there who has something to do with bullfights, though I'm not sure whether he's an actual picador or not. And no, I'm not going to link to any bullfighting websites, because this is a civilized blog, for the most part.

You might recall I did a "Hey, I know who did that" with the museum's Mistral No. 2 as well; this sounds like an impressive skill until you realize that Portland's official arts world (i.e. people who made a living creating "serious" art, whatever that is) was about twelve people (nearly 100% of them old white men) from WWII through 1990 or so. Their work is found all over Portland and around the Northwest, so in a way they're important in the "Who created that?" sense. But if they were really so amazing and talented, what were they doing in a podunk Republican timber town like 1950s Portland, instead of Manhattan where all the serious action was? (Or at least where all the serious money was?) That's a question I can never seem to get a straight answer to.

Some photos of Eye of Orion, a Manuel Izquierdo piece in the Portland Art Museum's outdoor sculpture court. It's not my favorite among the works of his that I've seen, but at least one random person has been spotted worshipping it, so reasonable people can disagree, I guess.

It also had a cameo role in QR/ART, a 2011 digital exhibition pairing the museum's traditional artworks with online digital remixes through the magic of QR codes. Yeah, QR codes. Which, in 2014, already seems more dated than any of the traditional works on display. What's more, Eye of Orion was paired with a page on weird-fiction.net that now comes up as a 404 (conceptual art not found).

Luckily(?) the Wayback Machine archived the page before it went away. That page turns out to be some incomprehensible yapping about the sculpture's supposed astrological significance. Or something. I"m not entirely sure what the author was getting at, other than the fact that Eye of Orion is somehow Very Very Important to the cosmos at large. Naturally the page mentions the former Masonic temple next door, because of course it would. The archived 'About' and 'Blog' pages are just spammy pages for various erectile dysfunction pills. Overall I'd rate it at about 350 to 400 milli-Timecubes. Maybe the whole thing's supposed to be deliberately loony, Subgenius-style. Or maybe we've found ourselves a second Eye of Orion cultist.

It seems like a dumb thing to start a cult about, if you ask me. I mean, worshiping a tower topped by a great lidless eye, wreathed in flame? Or at least wreathed in sorta-flame-shaped bronze bits? C'mon, guys, it's been done already. There were movies and everything. Although come to think of it, Orion and Sauron have never actually been seen at the same place at the same time, as far as I know. Waiiiit a minute...

This ongoing art project leads to some weird activities now and then. I was rifling through the Smithsonian public art database a while back, as one does, looking for new todo items for this humble blog, and saw an entry for Moon's Garden, a Manuel Izquierdo sculpture in downtown Portland. I'd never heard of it, and it wasn't on the usual maps or in the RACC database. Then I noticed it was in the lobby of a generic mid-rise office building at 1121 SW Salmon. When I see something isn't really public public art, I usually just shrug and cross it off the list, but I rather like Izquierdo's work, and I thought I'd see if I could track this one down.

So the legwork for this post involved walking in the building's front door, snapping one quick photo, and leaving. Not that I expected it would be a problem or anything; I just figured it would be tough explaining what I was up to if someone asked. I have enough of a hard time trying to explain it to myself and any remaining Gentle Reader(s) out there. Explaining this little project to a skeptical stranger might not go so smoothly. Anyway, I feel kind of bad that the one photo I got has a little motion blur to it. I like to think it gives the whole thing a more exciting cloak-n-dagger feel. (It doesn't, but I like to think it does.)

In any case, here it is. There's no mistaking it; it looks like a smaller sibling to The Dreamer and Silver Dawn. Call be biased, but an Izquierdo seems like a nice shiny way to brighten up any office (although certainly not the cheapest way of brightening up an office).

I may have mentioned once or twice that I'm rather fond of The Dreamer, the shiny bronze whatzit in Pettygrove Park. I recently found out it has a silvery sibling in NW Portland's Wallace Park, so obviously I had to go check it out. Silver Dawn is at the NE corner of the park, near the fenced off-leash dog area. The blurb from its RACC page is more artist bio than description:

“Silver Dawn” is an excellent example of the large biomorphic abstract sculptures that Manuel Izquierdo was known for. Izquierdo, a central figure in the mid-century Portland art scene, was born in Spain and came to Portland as a refugee who fled after the Spanish Civil War. He studied at the Museum Art School (now PNCA) and taught there for 46 years after graduating.

Silver Dawn makes a cameo in a blog post about the author's ongoing project to track down Izquierdo sculptures around the city. It mentions that Silver Dawn had once been in the middle of the off-leash area, and had also received dents and dings over the years, possibly thanks to balls from the nearby baseball/softball field.

The June 28th, 1980 Oregonian had a photo of Silver Dawn being installed, and the July 22nd paper mentioned it had just been dedicated as part of a repair and improvement effort at Wallace Park: "A sea-form sculpture by Manuel Izquierdo, selected in a national competition coordinated by the Northwest District Association, was dedicated during a neighborhood potluck." Silver Dawn was mentioned in passing in a 1982 article; this being the era before the internet and publicly accessible databases, the then-Metropolitan Arts Commission decided to put together a book cataloging the city's public art, fountains, murals and so forth, and they asked the public for suggestions to try to make the book as complete as possible. Which suggests they themselves didn't already have a master list to work from. Now, thirty-odd years later, they do at least have a public database of things they administer; works belonging to other government agencies or private owners are generally not listed, though. The Smithsonian art database is a bit more comprehensive, but isn't updated on an ongoing basis, so anything new in the last few years won't be listed. Still, the combination of these various sources is enough to keep this humble blog humming along, so I can't complain too much.

Incidentally, to go off on a mostly-unrelated tangent, I know exactly where I was on July 22nd, 1980. It was a hot day, and we were at our suburban neighborhood swimming pool. All of a sudden, people looked up and noticed a big grey mushroom cloud in the sky: Mt. St. Helens was erupting again. The famous destructive eruption had occurred back on May 18th, but the July eruption came on a clear sunny day and I think it may have been the only eruption I actually witnessed (at least until the volcano woke up again in 2004.) I even got out the family Kodamatic instant camera and took at least one photo of it, which I think I still have around somewhere. (If I ever find it again, I'll probably scan it and post it here.) The eruption was naturally the big lead story in the next day's paper.