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Portland's New Copper Lady
| Article
# : |
10671 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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1 / 1986 |
536 Words |
| Author
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Anne Smart
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One hundred years after the Statue of Liberty left France and sailed for the United States, the second largest copper sculpture in America left Baltimore, Maryland and headed west for Portland, Oregon by rail.
Three stories tall, Portlandia is Liberty's daughter. She was created with the same painstaking and antiquated techniques, and was commissioned by the Metropolitan Arts Commission to symbolize the city as a gateway to the Orient and Pacific Rim Trade.
Portlandia arrived in Portland on August 9, 1985. After an initial stopover at the city's train station, where only the head of the statue was displayed for the view of the public, it reached an intermediary stop at the marine fabrication facility of Gunderson Inc., where sculptor/architect Raymond Kaskey of Washington, D.C. assembled the statue's nine sections for Portlandia's October 6 dedication.
After a trip up the Willamette River on a barge accompanied by a flotilla of well-wishers, Portlandia finally reached its destination. It is now ensconced above Portland's Fifth Avenue on Michael Graves' postmodern architectural milestone, the Portland Building. Graves, who gave the sculpture its name, announced it "will completely change and enhance the building," and it does.
Over the last three years, sculptor Raymond Kaskey had enlarged his original two-foot-tall maquette to nine feet in clay and plaster. Then, using a pantograph and working off the plaster model, he constructed plywood contours, or templates. Laboriously he hammered 1 ½ tons of copper sheets over the templates to create
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