Mayor Bud Clark rode his bike down to Union Station one August morning in 1985 to greet Portland’s new face. On the front page of the next day’s Oregonian, he stands in a boxcar alongside sculptor Raymond Kaskey, addressing an eager press corps as a giant copper face you may or may not recognize looks on.
The giant lady was supposed to be so much more than the namesake of an IFC show. In the years he’d worked on Portlandia, after winning a public design contest, Kaskey took every chance to compare her to the Statue of Liberty, the face of America herself, as seen on every key chain, bottle opener, stamp, locket, coin, T-shirt, Christmas ornament, and novelty cast-iron pan imaginable. Not only was Portlandia made by the same grueling hammered-copper method, she was likewise a generically hopeful, mythic goddess.
“New Journalism” forefather Tom Wolfe backed him up, writing about Portlandia for the 100-year anniversary of Lady Liberty in Newsweek. Both statues were public art the way public art ought to be, Wolfe wrote, great populist monuments to a vague promise of hope…