PUBLIC ART

That artwork you pass every day? There’s an app for that.

PUBLIC ART IS AS MUCH a part of Portland’s cityscape as bike lanes and mountain views. While some pieces loom large, like the imposing Portlandia or mysterious Pod across from Powell’s, others might be encountered only through happenstance.

In February 2011, a tool debuted to give both the aficionado and the mere passerby information about these works. Public Art PDX is a free app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod by Matt Blair, who previously created a similar app for Portland’s heritage trees. Both were part of the Civic Apps Initiative, which invites developers to put publicly available data in people’s hands in innovative, engaging ways. (Other projects can point to bike racks or the nearest park, or help navigate TriMet.)

“Portland has so much art compared to other places, and there’s a lot to learn about the pieces,” says Blair, who imagined his former self as one of the users of Public Art PDX. While staying at a youth hostel a decade ago, he found a public art brochure in the hostel’s lobby and concocted his own tour of the MAX Blue Line. A visitor today could use the app to plot a walking tour in any part of town, and locals can discover art they never knew existed. In addition to mapping, the app includes a photo and artist information for each piece, and users who like a particular artist’s work can search for more. Anyone can submit new (or newly stumbled upon) artwork, but there aren’t many gaps. “RACC has done such a great job of organizing and cataloging the information about public art that it made this app possible in a way that it would not have been in other cities,” he says.

Indeed, that ready information is a reason Public Art PDX came about. From his post as Mayor Sam Adams’s arts and culture policy director, Cary Clarke was witness to both the launch of the Civic Apps challenge and RACC’s work to add its public art database to PortlandMaps.com, a site that connects property records with other stats. Creating a Civic App with RACC’s data, he thought, would help locals learn about and locate the art in their midst: “I thought, in particular, about how many afternoons I’d spent in Laurelhurst Park reading or doing crossword puzzles next to this one particular sculpture, yet I didn’t know anything about its history or the artist who’d made it.”

Clarke adds that such a tool also enriches the experience of tourists, especially with so much public art near downtown hotels. Blair estimates that some 10 percent of downloads so far are from outside of the US, from Argentina to Egypt to Japan.

The app is just one way RACC is “trying to make the public art collection more accessible,” says collections registrar Danielle Davis. In addition to appearing in paper maps and brochures, the searchable database on RACC’s website, and the pinpoints on PortlandMaps.com, the same information is also part of the New York–based Culture Now’s “Museum Without Walls,” a map-based directory of public art across the nation.