Overview

Book Introduction: This book contains over 100 original street art and graffiti photographs taken in the City of Portland, Oregon, located in the pacific northwestern United States. Portland is a mid-size city, with 2.3 million residents living in the metropolitan area. It is known for its liberal politics, wet and gloomy weather, eccentric quirkiness, local food movement, DIY economies, craft beer, artisan coffee, strip clubs, skateparks, and bicycle-friendliness. The unofficial, but popular, city slogan 'Keep Portland Weird' is found on building walls, T-shirts, car bumpers, and bike frames throughout the city. This document is an effort to help capture and preserve the temporary public expression that appears in the streets of Portland. Like every other major city in the world, people here reclaim and use their public spaces as a communication tool, a venue to express themselves and as a way share their ideas with others. Walking around Portland, you'll find thousands of legal and illegal public art pieces in the typical street mediums - murals, spray aerosol work, stickers, stencils, wheatpastes, installations, mosaic, reverse graffiti, moss graffiti, guerilla gardening, cuprocking, yarn bombing, and many more. They sometimes touch on the cultural challenges found in most cities, including repression, equality, unemployment, homelessness, drug abuse and environmental issues. Even though street art is being embraced by cities around the world as a cultural asset, Portland spends $2-5 million annually in public tax dollars on graffiti abatement. It employs two full-time graffiti police investigators. It has a 'zero-tolerance' policy requiring that all unpermitted public expression be promptly removed (fines are hundreds of dollars). Removal of artwork from privately owned public spaces is common. In some cases, unpermitted mural work has remained for many years in certain Portland locations for various reasons. Designated legal outlets for open free public expression do not currently exist in Portland, such as Free Walls that are prevalent in nearby cities like San Francisco, California and Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia, Washington. This book is a small window into the ephemeral world of street art in Portland. It's urban canvas is everchanging and in constant flux. This visual time capsule is not meant to be a comprehensive representation of Portland street art, its artists, or its history. It's meant to give you an opportunity to view the city from a different perspective. Some of these works only existed for a day or two before being washed away, written over by other artists or removed completely. These creative expressions serve as a reminder that nothing is permanent and that control is often just an illusion in the chaos of the city.

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