The Fair-Haired Dumbbell

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Title: Overall nighttime of the buildings
Photo Credit: KuDa Photography
Lead Artist(s):

Description:

The Fair-Haired Dumbbell building is a 6-story office-over-retail building in Portland, Oregon. Erected in 2017, the building is comprised of two separate masses, connected by skybridges. All four sides of each building, plus the roof (thus ten planes total) feature original artwork by James Jean. More than mere decoration, the mural for the Fair-Haired Dumbbell is symbolically merged with the architecture and inspired by its location and inhabitants.

“I began to design the mural by imagining that oblique walls of the building were formed by slicing down the sides to reveal cross sections of thundereggs (the Oregon state rock) and geodes. Ideas of transparency and discovery, of excavating slices of internal anatomy like MRI scans, are apt for a building that will no doubt attract creative tenants due to its bold exterior. The random, staggered distribution of windows are like cut arteries and conduits, and the thundereggs impart a view into the morphology of the building. Their slow-forming inertia is a counterpoint to the speed of the swirling kinetic activity on the streets. Thus, the twin structures become a cross section of creativity seemingly growing and changing by absorbing the energy from the flux around and within it.

In contrast to the hard, crystalline lines of the thunderegg motif, a lyrical network of flowers links the elements together. Their design is meant to evoke notions of growth, adaptability, and interconnectedness. The fictional flowers, a visual hybrid of the rose (the Portland city flower) and the Oregon Grape (the Oregon state flower), erupt from the ground and wrap around the thundereggs at points, symbolic of the city’s relationship with nature, its mindfulness of the environment, and the flourishing activity in the area.”

PROJECT LOCATION

Wall
The artwork is a mural covering all of the exterior walls on two six-story office-over-retail buildings connected by skybridges.
The Fair-Haired Dumbbell
11 NE Martin Luther King Blvd.
Portland, OR 97232
United States

click the map to enlarge
PROJECT TEAM

Guerrilla Development
Peggy Kendellen
Regional Arts & Culture Council
Dan Cohen Creative Labs
PROJECT DETAILS

Permanent
$535,000
Private
Mural
Mural
Latex paint applied to synthetic stucco.
2017
2018