i'll admit that I haven't put the time in that i'd like to to explore all the sculptures, statues, and public art that is available in Portland, but this piece, called "ideals", is right on the path of a regular commute from my house, and i've stopped many times just to admire it, from different angles. Unfortunately I do not have the artists' name available at the moment, but i would like to look it up and check out more of his or her work. So far this is my first or second favorite sculpture in Portland, I really love it and the name is perfectly fitting to me.
The lines and aesthetic of the sculpture are totally out of place for the neighborhood. To my understanding, the area of town was primarily an African American housing area, when a developer came in and started buying up all the land, with a vision to make a "second downtown" Portland, on the other side of the river. Except since this was in the 50s and 70s, that vision of a modern urban environment was not a pedestrian/bike friendly community, but instead a sea of parking lots, parking structures, wide multi-lane streets, and impersonal and stark towers that rise up for perhaps no other reason than American pride. I wouldn't really believe that all of these towers are actually filled with businesses.
Anyways, with the piece being called ideals, i feel like its this beacon of creativity and commentary in an area void of creativity. It's like the whole Lloyd district was a man's ideals, some vision of what a prosperous productive place would look like, his ideals of what would make him a rich and famous man. So blinded by it, that by the time it was all built, we were left with an ugly vacant quarter of town where no one lives or walks around.
The robed female figure has an extremely attractive body, and is casually, arrogantly posed with the head tilted up, and a hand up as if the figure were a queen greeting a crowd of her subjects below in a dismissive way.
I wonder if the figure of a woman is the generalized embodiment of a man's ideals; the woman herself is not actually there because sometimes we just get blinded by our ideals. We may think up something that we wish to attain, and get so preoccupied on it, obsessed with it, that once we get there we may realize that our ideals weren't fully thought out, and at worst, maybe entirely empty and not what we really wanted at all.