Visiting an unfamiliar city and trying to get a hold of it means walking the streets and looking up, talking to the locals over food and in front of art in the light of day and over cold beverages in the dark of bars, eating breakfast at vintage spots away from the hotel, and seeking immersion in the arts scene. You need an architectural guidebook, an appetite, sensible shoes, and to not get hit by a tram. Portland’s urban fabric is solid, largely still intact, and compact, with small blocks that are half the size of Manhattan’s allowing for lots of corner frontages and full block buildings that are easily comprehensible. Of course New Yorkers were here, including Henry Villard who brought the railway across the country and through Oregon in the 1880s, and whose own mansion designed by McKim, Mead & White, sits across Madison from the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown. Villard commissioned that eminent firm to build the late, lamented Portland Hotel in the civic center in Pioneer Courthouse Square, completed 1890. It was wantonly torn down in 1951 and replaced by a parking lot. Now the site features but one remnant of that vanished Queen Anne style palace: its iron gates, a reduced version of similar ones that still front the Villard Houses in NYC. These are integrated into a plaza—postmodern and good—finished in 1984 and surrounded by freestanding terracotta-covered columns, in a nod to a favorite Portland architectural cladding. At the northwest corner one column is collapsed—part of the design—broken into segments lying fractured on the red brick floor. It is an historicist reference to the earthquake-demolished Temple of Zeus at Olympia in Greece, with its massive marble columns tumbled and drums segmented like a roll of mints dropped on the floor and escaped from their foil sheathing. In this way Portland’s history of ongoing renewal is acknowledged. [...]
[...] The best of the PDX art is in materials that grab the eye more than paintings...In a glass vitrine on concourse D is a temporary work: Malia Jensen’s playfully invasive While You Were Away (2026). A big bear, sculpted from plaster of Paris, emerges from a dark hole in the wooden floor. Jensen, who shows with Cristin Tierney, has painted him with acrylics in all different colors and in a slapdash way marked by brushstrokes, drips, dabs, and hatchings. Pink, lime green, baby blue and black. The animal looks as if he has come through a gantlet of pigment-wielding kids to emerge, blinking, up into the chaos of the terminal near gate D7. Behind the shaggy critter is an orange ceramic traffic cone, its peak cracked and battered, made of clay from the Willamina woods where Jensen grew up in the ’70s. It is unfortunate that the work is in a vitrine, because the strangeness of the bear’s eruptive presence is diminished, but the artist relates this to her childhood wonder at dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, here given a surreal narrative far afield from those static scenes of refulgent ecosystems in museum displays. An airport is no place for surprises, I guess, and the glass gives it the feeling of a cabinet of curiosity.
