5 new murals celebrate the real Portland

Portland’s Old Town has a secret: if you find the right wall, you can dance under the raindrops even on a sunny summer day.

The “It’s Rainin’ Love” mural at the Maybelle Center for Community in Portland on Southwest Sixth Avenue near Couch Street is an augmented reality experience. Scan the QR code, download an app, and soon you’ll find yourself in front of a wall covered in moving pictures as choirs sing through your phone speaker.

This mural is just one of new projects across Portland that celebrate the city as it is, a complicated tapestry of people living in all sorts of conditions, trying to find joy in the wake of a pandemic. that changes the world.

Crystal Menesis Enable Arts is the organizer of the “It’s Rainin’ Love Project”, which brought together the Maybelle Center, three choirs, artists and animators.

“I’ve been researching augmented reality for a while now,” Meneses said as she stood in front of the brightly colored wall in the Old Town in early July.

The hustle and bustle of life in downtown Portland moved around her – trucks dropping off deliveries, visitors to the neighborhood with cups of coffee, people living outside on the streets. The mural occupies the side of an entire building, and shapes and words, even static in ordinary reality, spring from the wall.

“I was just waiting for the right moment,” she said. “My relationship with Maybelle was the perfect relationship to build something like this and try it for the first time.”

The Maybelle Center next door was created to help build community and breaking social isolation. They provide affordable housing and services to help people connect, including arts programs and a choir.

“Our members, they speak this creative language,” Meneses said.

The mural was born from this creativity.

“We created it on purpose as a collective,” Meneses said. She wrote a Pride anthem, based on listening to Maybelle’s queer and ally band. This song, “It’s Rainin’ Love”, is sung by three choirs – Portland Lesbian Choir, Portland Gay Men’s Chorus. and Maybelle Community Singers.

Designer and illustrator Ridan Arellano did the visual design and Maybelle members and volunteers and even passers-by on the street did the painting.

The mural outside Badlands, which was once Embers’ iconic gay bar, was completed in late June.

Old Town is the hub of many Portlands – home to people of all economic backgrounds, shops, restaurants and nightclubs. Recently, the old town has become contested ground. City sweeps have cleared the streets of tents, but the area is a service center for the homeless and the sweeps have not improved the lives of homeless people, some of whom are still in the area but with less of shelters.

Homelessness in Portland has been the subject of local and national interest, particularly in recent years. What these larger narratives may miss are the stories of real people living homeless on the streets.

Murals can tell a more personal story. On Southeast 34th Avenue and Belmont Street, on the Belmont Market side, another new mural celebrates Leroy Sly Scott, who spent 30 years living homeless in the Sunnyside neighborhood.

Scott died in 2020 of cancer, shortly after moving into a home, but his friends, the artists and the Portland Street Art Alliance worked together last winter to create a mural in his honor where he spent so much time.

Now Scott’s face and a quote he loved — “All over the world the same song,” inspired by a song by Digital Underground — adorn the side of the market.

“Leroy was a very colorful person,” said Caleb Ruecker, an artist and friend of Scott’s. told Oregon Public Broadcasting in June. “He was just loving, caring and cheerful. He always greeted people on the street. We wanted a mural to pay homage to his life and bring his porch to life.

Murals are a perfect form to humanize people who are often seen in the abstract.

“Public works of art help us realize our humanity and our common relationships,” said Tiffany Conklin, executive director of the Portland Street Art Alliance, which is behind many of the murals that stand in Portland.

“It’s free and openly available to everyone,” Conklin said, “not just a select few who can afford to go to art museums or are welcomed into art galleries.”

Another recent project the Portland Street Art Alliance has been involved in, completed in January, is “We are Portland”. It spans an entire city block southeast of Seventh Avenue and Division Street on Gerber Collision and Glass, is made up of warm, welcoming faces, nearly a story high.

“’We are Portland’ is a mural focusing on several portraits, showing the diversity of our city; LGBTQIA+, people of color, diverse ages, and gender identities, homeless people, and people with disabilities,” said artist Devin Finley in a statement on Instagram. “I wanted to move away from the typical skin tones used to represent people and experiment with a range of other colors.”

The faces are set in front of blue mountains and interspersed with graffiti, a nod, Finley said, to his roots, but also to his family – his children’s names are part of what is written in the graffiti.

The fresco is huge and best seen from afar. Keep your eyes peeled as you cross the 99W bridge.

Another Portland Street Art Alliance mural you might miss if you’re not careful is “Inheritance” at 250 SW Taylor St. To find this mural, stand at Southwest Second and Salmon Street, facing north and look up.

Portland muralists Alex Chiu and Jeremy Nichols had to undergo special training and certification, then spent 10 days and 11 floors painting this mural this spring.

The mural, which shows an elderly person’s hand passing a bowl filled with Pacific Northwest symbols to a younger person, is “a celebration of the beauty of life in the Pacific Northwest”, Chiu said in a statement.

“The theme of inheritance has become important to me as a father of young

kids, and something I constantly think about as my parents grow up,” he said. “For me, the mural is a hopeful depiction of the relationship between older and younger generations.”

Hope and fantasy are also part of the fabric of Portland. And the art that wraps three sides of Salt & Straw’s production kitchen at Southeast Second Avenue and Ankeny Street is the perfect example of next-level whimsy.

There, among the warehouses, trucks and tents of the industrial Eastside, colorful cartoon characters and treats will compel you to stop and reorient yourself through the building.

The work on the building is a pure and sweet nostalgia. There are characters from Candyland and characters from “The Year Without Santa,” an animated holiday special from the 1970s.

This is another Portland Street Art Alliance project completed in December 2021 with 17 Portland artists.

“These artists are incredibly talented and giving them a canvas to display their art is truly an honor,” Salt & Straw CEO Kim Malek said in a statement. “We feel so lucky to be honored with their great work every day when we come to work – it makes every day better for hundreds of people in the area!”

This is, in fact, the purpose of the whole public art project – to celebrate the place where we live and to bring joy to all the people who live here.

-Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052 [email protected], @lizzzyacker