Who do we see when we wander through Portland’s parks? We encounter joggers and walkers, dogs on leash and off, kids and picnickers, soccer players and softball players, and an occasional homeless person salvaging returnable cans or curled up in a quiet corner. We see individuals. We see teams. We see families—families in the flesh and, if we’re in the right places, frozen families cast in bronze.
Who are these silent families who have become our permanent neighbors? What were they up to? Would we want to invite them home for dinner? Whether we look at them in passing or pause to ponder them, what do they tell us about ourselves and the way we understand our community?
In the very center of Portland is “The Promised Land,” an imposing curiosity that has finally found a home in Chapman Square. It was commissioned in the 1990s by the Oregon Trail Coordinating Committee, funded with private contributions, and deposited on the doorstep of a somewhat surprised Oregon Historical Society. Pioneer father, mother, and son stand together peering toward their future home in the Edenic Willamette Valley at the end of the Oregon Trail. Portlanders did not universally applaud either the sentiment or its sculptural expression. Some thought it a heroic tribute to undaunted pioneers. Others wondered where the daughter was hidden, where the Indians might be, and where their emaciated and exhausted ox team had been parked. Still others thought it just plain schmaltzy.
When official commemoration of the Oregon Trail faded after 1995, the family relocated to the Lloyd District adjacent to the light rail tracks. Still looking westward, the installation might have been titled “We should have taken MAX.” It’s now moved a third time to Chapman Square to be viewed by people scurrying to the Court House for jury duty. The father still bears a striking resemblance to the fiery fanatic John Brown, who had nothing to do with Oregon but plenty to do with the Civil War.
The pioneer family would certainly be an anomaly if their metallic forms came alive today. According to the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, married couples with children under age eighteen make up only 15 percent of Portland’s households (those are 2003 figures). More than one third of Portland’s households with children have only a single parent present, suggesting that we might want to saw the statue down the middle to represent twenty-first century divorce and separation rates.
The obvious contrast to “The Promised Land” on many dimensions stands in Washington Park, where Sacajawea cradles her son Jean-Baptiste. The Women’s Committee of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition commissioned the Sacajawea statue As historian Deborah Olson has shown, these women worked long and hard to see that Portland business leaders did not completely ignore women as they mounted the first world’s fair on the west coast. They thought that a statue of the famous Shoshone guide would fill two gaps in the fair’s program. Its dedication brought together noted women’s rights leaders including Susan B. Anthony and Oregon’s indomitable Abigail Scott Duniway.
So Sacajawea stands simultaneously for the native peoples pushed aside by the pioneer family and women who played central roles in the history of the Northwest. In “The Promised Land,” mom stands carefully protected by dad (to the side with his arm around her) and junior (in front). Sacajawea has no one to fend off the unknown dangers of yesteryear and the pigeons and picnickers of today. She stands on her own. Have we been pedaling backward from and inclusive to an exclusive vision over the last century?
And speaking of Abigail Scott Duniway, her bronze brother Harvey, a firm opponent of woman suffrage, stands steadfast on the top of Mt. Tabor. Abigail was an adamant advocate for women’s rights (as well as a novelist and journalist). Harvey, editor of The Oregonian, was a rock-ribbed conservative who deplored everything Abigail worked for. Atop Mt. Tabor his bronze gaze is steadfastly eastward, toward the American past rather than its future. That’s an odd stance for one of the state’s biggest boosters and a curious contrast with Sacajawea, who looks toward the setting sun (even if the sunset is obscured by the high ridge in front of her).
There’s another curious connection between Portland’s statuary and a public art controversy in Santa Fe, one that involved an improbable confrontation between future president Harry Truman and the famous writer Mary Austin, author of Land of Little Rain and other portraits of the Southwest. As a rising politician in the 1920s, Truman was all in favor of improved roads for the coming age of automobiles. Missouri boosters had joined forces with the Daughters of the American Revolution to place copies of a pink-hued concrete “Pioneer Mother” at multiple sites along a historic set of roads and trails that spanned the continent—starting with the Cumberland Road in Maryland and ending with the Spanish Trail into California.
Most cities liked the free statuary, but not the self-consciously sophisticated Santa Fe arts community. These are the folks who were cultivating a hybrid “Santa Fe style” and imagining a romantic Spanish-Indian past that they much preferred to the history of American Manifest Destiny. They raised a fuss—Mary Austin haranguing the future president—and the statue intended for Santa Fe ended up in Albuquerque.
What’s the connection? The women of the DAR asked sculptor August Leimbach to model “Pioneer Mother” after a photograph of Portland’s Sacajawea . . . completing a circle back to Chapman Square and “The Promised Land.” This is not to mention that Portland’s statue commemorates the Oregon Trail and the DAR’s project memorialized the Santa Fe Trail as part of their “Pioneer Memorial Highway.”
This brief excursion suggests that we can and should actively look at public art for the cultural claims that it embodies. It is easy not to. Riding MAX we may take a quick glance at station art, but we’re more likely to worry about finding a seat. Running late for an appointment in a public office, we don’t look long and hard at the installations in the lobby that are the fruit of Portland and Multnomah County’s “percent for art” program for all public construction projects.
When we do look, we see a lot more Nature than people. There are petrified trees, aluminum feathers, bronze swallows, an oversized elk, granite diatoms, vines on glass, and many other variations. In Oregon it’s also hard to go wrong with fish, or with cute animal families like the peaceable kingdom of seals, otter, beavers, and bears around the Pioneer Courthouse (make that semi-peaceable, since mama bear is noshing on a salmon).
But even animals can be trouble. A few years back, Dallas real estate mogul Trammel Crow funded a massive bronze depiction of dozens of supersized Texas longhorns in perpetual stampede near city hall. Texas. Cattle. What’s the problem? Neighboring Fort Worth had a fit, that’s what. Dallas was never a cowtown! That was Fort Worth’s claim to fame (along with being the city “where the West begins”). Not only was Dallas bigger and richer, but it was stealing Fort Worth’s history. Better for Dallas than longhorns, said Fort Worthians, would be dozens of bronze oil derricks or jumbo Neiman-Marcus shopping bags.
Portland recently went through a minor version of this controversy when the Chinese American community rejected a dragon designed for the Northwest Davis “festival street” because its head seemed improperly and insultingly ensnared in a wok.
In its turn, the reluctant dragon leads back to another story of families in public art. At the terminus of the Interstate MAX, Valerie Otani constructed traditional Japanese gates hung with simulacra of internee identification tags. The adjacent Expo Center, home to many a boat show and RV extravaganza, was the assembly point in 1942 for Oregon’s Japanese Americans in their way to wartime internment camps.
Internment, as we know, was an intensely family experience. Parents, children, and grandparents were collected and tagged as family units, transported as families, housed at Manzanar or Tule Lake as families. Otani’s installation may not be instantly recognizable as a family portrait, but if we look . . . observe . . . consider . . . we see that it is as much about family as the Chapman Square bronze.
In the total mix of public art, families are few and far between. Teddy Roosevelt overlooks the Park Blocks without the help of his numerous relations. Portlandia is imposing a she kneels to roll dice across Fifth Avenue, but she has neither consort nor progeny (although she’s presumably fairy godmother to everyone in the city).
Maybe one reason is the barbed reception of the forty-year-old curiosity in front of the Standard Insurance Building, the three sinuous bodies officially titled “Quest” but known widely among Portlanders as “Three Groins in a Fountain” and “Family Night at the Y.” More seriously, representations of nature are more comforting to look at, raising no troubling questions of racial absence and gender hierarchy.
Nor does our last quasi-family raise these questions. The Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden in Grant Park gives us three characters from the perfect time—from the 1950s when the United States still seemed hopeful and innocent, from elementary school years before the tree of knowledge is fully sampled. Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, and Henry’s dog Ribsy aren’t exactly a family (where’s Ramona’s older sister Beezus?), but they come close to forming a community of values and experiences.
As we look at Portland’s frozen families, what’s our inclination? Self-reliant, isolated individuals staring solemnly at a land to be conquered? Kids whose kinship comes from the experiences of everyday life?
Here’s my preference. Census data tell us that there are still traditional Ozzie and Harriet families to be found in the United States, complete with mom, dad, and two children living at home, but they’re more likely to be Asian Americans or Latinos than the traditional European Americans who pioneered the Oregon Trail and television sitcoms. What we need is two more families meeting to shake hands in Chapman Square—new Americans from Southeast Asia looking east toward political freedom and Mexican Americans (fully documented, of course) looking north to the promised land of Oregon opportunity.
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