Museum Without Walls

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On the ninth floor balcony of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland, a bespeckled attorney doggedly cross-examines a defendant. An owlish judge looks on. Even without saying a word, the accused looks as guilty as the cat that swallowed the canary.

But then, he really is the cat that swallowed the canary — complete with a feline face and an incriminating feather still sticking out of his mouth. What’s more, the owlish judge is indeed an owl, the dogged attorney a dog, and a mix of critters—bird, mouse and dogs—serve as jurors.

In these halls of justice, where visitors might expect to find heroic statues of presidents in keeping with the gravity of the setting, I find instead Law of Nature, a menagerie of bronze animals carrying out a mock trial in the most satirical, whimsical way. As if this fanciful artwork weren’t enough of a treat, the ninth floor’s outdoor balcony also rewards me with an eagle’s-nest panorama of downtown. Talk about being in the catbird seat.

But for art lovers, that’s pretty much true anywhere in Portland, a city that’s a veritable museum without walls of quirky, daring public art. At times, the sculptures almost seem to outnumber the lamp posts. The area’s Regional Arts & Culture Council oversees 1,500 pieces of taxpayer-funded art, an impressive figure that does not include the artwork owned by local museums and universities.

Best of all, many of the pieces are right downtown, within easy walking distance of one another. After kicking off my sculptural scavenger hunt at the Hatfield Courthouse, I stroll to the nearby Portland Building to see the city’s chief symbol, Portlandia. The 6H-ton, 35-foot-tall toga-wearing female figure is the second-largest hammered-copper statue in the country (only the Statue of Liberty is bigger). To pound the dime-thin copper into shape, artist Raymond Kaskey hammered each square inch of the statue about 50 times.

Lots of cities have artsy cafes, but few can match the world-class treasures found at the
Portland Art Museum’s free outdoor sculpture garden, complete with an adjoining cafe. Espresso in hand, I relax at one of the garden’s Parisian-style tables and peruse the dozen bronze works by some of the world’s most renowned sculptors, including Rodin, Renoir and Henry Moore. Unlike most public art that’s cemented in the same place forever, the sculpture garden features an ever-changing assortment.

My next stop is the Pioneer Courthouse Square Weather Machine, a 25-foot-tall hatrack-shaped sculpture that doubles as a functioning weather vane. Each day at noon, a metallic
figure symbolizing the day’s forecast — a blue heron for drizzle, the sun for clear skies and a dragon for storms — pops out of the gold dome, accompanied by a recorded trumpet fanfare and a gush of mist.

To see animals native to the region, you can either head to the zoo — or head downtown, where life-sized bronze replicas of bears, deer, beavers, seals and other wild creatures cavort in and around oval water fountains sprinkled along Yamhill and Morrison streets between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

As if they’d come to life, the animals seem as curious about the onlookers as onlookers are about them. A family of otters perches on the rim of a fountain for a better view of anyone who happens by. An ambitious beaver joins pedestrians on the sidewalk to reach a tempting tree. Here, it’s easy to tell which animals are most popular: Their bronze heads and noses are shiny from ceaseless polishing by the legions of passersby who give them a pat.

On the Fifth Avenue bus mall, I pass what’s arguably the most recognizable piece of public art created in the 20th century — Kvinneakt. This life-sized bronze nude female figure was featured in the now-famous 1970s-era “expose yourself to art” wall poster, which showed a male flasher, his back to the camera and his coat wide open, taking the slogan a bit too literally. The poster became a cult favorite in college dorm rooms nationwide. And the flasher, local tavern owner Bud Clark, later became mayor of Portland.

Hopping the MAX light-rail train, I travel westbound in pursuit of artwork that sinks to a new low — 260 feet underground, to be exact. That’s the depth of the Washington Park MAX tunnel, the deepest transit tunnel in the nation and the second-deepest in the world.

There, I join clusters of commuters pondering the “core sample timeline.” Using an actual 260-foot-long geological drilling sample as a visual timeline, local artist Bill Will created wall inscriptions that document the floods and eruptions that shaped the local geography, as well as corresponding advances in human creativity, ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to sophisticated mathematics.

The eastbound MAX whisks me back across town to the Oregon Convention Center, home to Principia, an artwork featuring a 900-pound bronze ball that sways from a 70-foot-long cable above an inlaid terrazzo floor that depicts the solar system. Named after a 19th-century French physicist who discovered that the earth’s rotation changes the direction of a pendulum’s swing, the Foucault pendulum may appear to be rotating, but
it’s actually the earth, not the pendulum, that’s turning. The “Sistine Chapel effect” is in full force here, with passersby gladly risking stiff necks to follow the ball’s mesmerizing sway.

Returning downtown, I wander Southwest Yamhill Street between Third and Fourth avenues, where otherwise-sane pedestrians start zigzagging down the sidewalk as if engaged in an imaginary game of hopscotch. In fact, they’re experiencing another Bill Will creation called Streetwise, a series of inscribed granite blocks embedded in the brickwork. The inscriptions are so baffling in some cases (“bird rib,” “landlubber,” “time out”), insightful in others (“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream — Edgar Allan Poe”), that they literally stop people in their tracks.
My mind reeling with images of bronze animals, a copper goddess and a colossal pendulum, I’m struck by one Streetwise inscription that neatly sums up my public-art safari.

It says, “Now I’ve seen everything.”