Portland Building Art

This week RACC puts out the call for artists to fill an 11' x 13' x 7' space in the lobby of the Portland Building in rotating month-long installations through 2008 and into 2009. Yes, that's the same Portland Building that features the gigantic Portlandia sculpture on the outer front pedestal and hideously confined city employee offices on the inside. BUT. The city should be commended for setting aside a space where its employees and visitors (including those who come to the building to pay their water bills) can enjoy a rotating series of innovative installations by some of the community's great emerging artists. The best thing about this installation space is that there's always a comment book, and I love reading what people have to say about any given exhibit there.

Artists can download guidelines here, and RACC has also created a fantastic new online gallery of all the strange and wonderful installations that have appeard in this space over the past 13 years. Not only do you get a sense of the wide variety of projects that have appeared here (including several performance-based installations), but the artist's statements for each installation are shown as well.

For one review of the current installation -- and one artist's interesting remarks about being selected to present something in this space in the past -- take a look at Hilary Pfeifer's blog.