These are mostly some older news items, but are worth notice.
New Art Downtown
The City and Public Art Commission have installed a couple more utility cabinet wraps downtown. (The first was the art of Robert Schlegel at Chemeketa and Commercial.)
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| Betty LaDuke, State and Front |
The art of Betty LaDuke is at State and Front, by the Boise Building.
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| Jack McLarty, Court and Front |
And the art of Jack McLarty is at Court and Front by the parking lot.
The Art Commission meets on Thursday the 10th, and they are also talking about three more sculptural installations, two downtown and one in West Salem.
For the two downtown, the Downtown Advisory passed along some selection cues:
the Downtown Advisory Board discussed the benefits/experiences they would like considered in the sculptures selected. They were, Groovy, Not L.A., Local art/artist, Connectivity (past, present future), Interactive/selfie, Experiential
Hopefully future installations will be less conceptual and abstract, and more popularly accessible, than some recent installations around the city. If a piece seems to need an "artist statement" for explanation, it's too complicated! Street art is for the street, not the museum or gallery.
Churn at the Boise Building
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| Back in December. Now, abandoned plans? |
In the background of the Betty LaDuke wrap are some "for sale" signs on the Boise Building. Back in December you might remember a short piece in the paper talking about plans for that building and the DA White Seed Warehouse. At the time they seemed a little ambitious and optimistic, particularly in the case of the seed warehouse. The "for sale" signs suggest those plans might have stalled. Currently the storefront is showing what appear to be tiny shelters for pods.
The listing appears to be trying to rebrand the building as the "Furlong Building" rather than using the traditional name of Boise Building. (The seed warehouse also appears to be bundled with it, though deemphasized, since it's a real fixer-upper.)
Hopefully someone with a greater interest and core competence in historic buildings and their rehabilitation will be able to turn things around. This corner at the entry to Riverfront Park just seems like it has to be a location with real potential.
Losing a Cemetery Site and Database
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| Gone! The cemetery database has disappeared (via the Internet Archive) |
A friend of the blog alerted us to a terrible loss in historical records. The IOOF Salem Pioneer Cemetery website and database has disappeared, and the url now redirects to a generic City of Salem webpage.
While some of the pages have been archived and are accessible via the Internet Archive, individual burial records with lot number, obituaries from old newspapers, other biographical citations, and some headstone photos were not archived and are now, at least temporarily, lost.
It's not a resource a person necessarily needs every day, of course, but when you do, it's mighty handy.
The City has not made any announcement about this, and they should have. Maybe there will be more to say later. The City was trying to shed the online Salem history and the online presence of the Salem Library Historic Photo Collection, and this move in the opposite direction is a little odd.
Clearly there will be more to say later.
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