October 15, 2020: Mural Report -

The Oregon Historical Society is housed in a building with the biggest trompe l’oeil mural I have ever seen. It’s so much better in real life, but I’m giving you a photo, and what you need to know, when you look at this building, is that the wall of the tower facing you is flat. You can see it easily if you look at the top, where the sky doesn’t match. But the collonades don’t curve out, further down, and there isn’t a recessed set of windows going up the center. It’s just flat.

I  completely love this mural because it trompes the oeil so very well, and I have never really troubled myself much about the somewhat cartoonish figures in front of the façade. The façade is amazing! Forget the figures in front.

But I stood and stared at tthose figures for a while yesterday, because the wall had been defaced and I wanted to see why someone had taken against it.

In front of the fake façade, you can see Lewis and Clark, and Sacagawea and her baby, and York, Clark’s enslaved Black “body servant,” and Seaman, the expedition dog.

That’s an entirely unsurprising cast of characters to adorn the Oregon Historical Society building.

In Portland this weekend, red paint was splashed on this mural (you can see some of it, if you expand), and some street level windows of the Historical Society were broken, and a Bicentennial quilt made by 15 Black women was stolen from the building, and then abandoned, blocks away, in the rain.

It was hugely demoralizing. Why steal the quilt? Why beat up the Historical Society? They aren’t the bad guys. Maybe the were the bad guys at some point, like every museum when I was little that gave short shrift to indigenous people. But they’ve grown and changed, and they are sponsoring an online talk with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in a couple of weeks, and their unbroken windows are covered right now with photos of suffragists.

I stood looking at the mural, and wondering if it had been vandalized because it was offensive. The cartoonish Lewis and Clark cast isn’t great art, true, but I doubted the place was defaced by an art critic.

And then I began to worry that I must be just like all the folks who are distressed about Confederate monuments coming down. Am I blind to something offensive because I love the trompe l’oeil façade so much?

I have not wondered before if I’m like people who love Confederate statues. I probably have much to learn in this regard. And given my chosen pals, pretty soon someone will probably educate me about why the mural is a problem.

Or maybe not.

Maybe it was just plain vandalism, not a statement about Lewis and Clark and York and Sacagawea. I would like to hope it was just plain vandalism.

There’s not a whole lot of red paint. They can probably clean it up. The Historical Society reopened, after putting up a lot of plywood. The quilt is being dried and looked after, and it wasn’t torn, but sadly, some of the colors ran in the rain.

Like many supporters, I got an email from the director yesterday. It was grave and respectful, and it ended with a photo of an actual handwritten note that the director had received, along with a dollar, from one of our homeless neighbors.

The guy who broke the Historical Society windows was arrested. He is from Indiana, and he also had a gun.

The headlines note that the vandalism of the Historical Society was met with “widespread condemnation.” I’ll say.

I will now speak for all of Portland, and say that we would like angry, armed, destructive guys from Indiana to go home and stay home, and give Portland a break. We aren’t here so you can come on out and break things.

(Update: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla expressed "revulsion" at the vandalism of the OHS.)