Downtown Portland Art and Rioters

I took a walk downtown last night for a nightly stroll without any sort of agenda. Well, yeah, there was an agenda. I’m getting fat and need some exercise. Downtown Portland right now is a sight to see. All the craziness in Portland intensified in the midst of the George Floyd murder last year. All of the protesters would gather downtown like clockwork every single night and protesting was the protesters cover to break the windows of the established downtown businesses, litter the streets, and have nightly battles with local and federal police. Because of that, most businesses on the ground floor have covered their windows with plywood and 2x4s so they don’t become the victim of a really expensive broken window bill. Now I realize I’m greatly exaggerating these events, but really, it’s not that exaggerated.

But this is not what we’re going to talk about today. As I made it to Pioneer square and the Pioneer Place Mall, the mall was covered with artwork protecting the windows. The set of pictures below rings the Pioneer Place mall. I am not a photographer; I just snapped these pictures with my Pixel 3 phone because I thought some of them were cool (but all should be shown) and makes for an article on the blog.

Oh, by coincidence, a businesses huge front window was broken last night. There was a couple police cars and about 8 policemen and policewomen (police people? tha Police? popo’s?) Here’s what that looked like:

These 4 pictures here I was requested to take. As I was taking pictures of the artwork circling Pioneer Place mall, a gentleman walked up to me and asked me if I was interested in buying some of his art, which he had arranged on 3×5 or similar cards. I told him the artwork was great but I didn’t have any money. He then asked what I was doing and I told him I was walking around Portland taking pictures of artwork I see on the streets and then put them on my website/blog. His eyes lit up then and he pointed me to where his art was on the walls near where I was taking pictures. Sure enough around the corner were these 4 panels above.

Some of these pictures are going to be kind of dark because I took them at night. Hopefully, they will be legible and can be made out for what they are. I had to adjust down the quality of the pictures to get them uploaded to the site but hopefully on magnifying them the details can be made out.

The rest of these pictures below are the actual pictures that circle the mall. One of these is not actually a painting or piece of the street of art, it’s actually an advertisement. Can you find it? Okay, it was the Gucci picture that opened this article up above.

So, these are the paintings, street art, graffiti, whatever, that is currently surrounding Pioneer Place downtown not so much as to showcase this art but more to protect the precious and expensive glass behind which Portland Protestors seem to be very adept at breaking, regardless the thickness, the threat of personal injury or death, whatever. I hope you enjoyed these pictures and look for more coming soon.