Portland artists bring color and history to renovated Albina Library

Amirah Chatman walked into a spacious community room on Saturday and took in the floor-to-ceiling wall of color in front of her.

Pastel colors — soft blues, light oranges, warm reds — formed textured swirls on the mural that covered more than 600 square feet in one of the ground floor rooms of the Albina Library.

“How beautiful,” she said as she entered the room with her fiance, Daniel Coggins. “This is crazy.”

Although Chatman created the design herself, it was her first time seeing it printed along the length of an entire wall: The original work was only a few feet across before it was digitally scanned and reproduced on a gargantuan scale.

Outside the windows of the community room, another mural decorated the two-story high wall of a courtyard at the center of the library — the work of Portland-based artist Daren Todd. Other paintings and sculptures by local artists decorated the walls, sat on plinths or hung from the ceiling.

And around 10 a.m. Saturday, all of the new artwork was free for the public to peruse when the library reopened its doors for the first time since it was closed for renovations in March 2023.

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The renovation at Albina — which cost roughly $55 million — marks the fourth library Multnomah County has upgraded since voters approved a capital bond measure to modernize libraries in 2020. The new two-story Albina Library features 30,000 square feet of space, multiple community rooms, a courtyard and a technology room.

And, of course, a lot of art.

Liz Sauer, the Multnomah County Library’s communications manager and a member of the artist selection panel, said the county collaborated with the Regional Arts and Culture Council to work with residents in finding artists whose work represented the local community.

For decades after World War II, the Albina district formed a vibrant community of single-family homes and Black-owned barbershops, grocery stores and jazz clubs. But thousands of residents were displaced by government projects that demolished homes, sometimes replacing them with nothing more than empty lots.

In recent years, Albina residents, community organizations and government agencies have made moves to invest in the neighborhood and create events that reflect its community and its history — which Todd said he integrated into the mural he designed and painted with the help of several assistants.

“I was really looking at (creating) a history and a cross-section of the Albina neighborhood and thinking about some symbols of things that people would recognize,” he said of the abstract mural. “It’s kind of an archive of symbols and colors that build up a texture for the Albina area.” He added that his final design drew from extensive interviews of Albina residents that the library renovation design team conducted.

Hidden in the mural — which took more than 50 gallons of paint to create — are shapes reminiscent of local plants and leaves that Todd said symbolized growth and connection to the land.

But the painting acknowledges darker chapters of Portland’s history as well.

There’s a river-shaped pattern that references the devastating Vanport Flood that displaced thousands of people. There is also an abstract road, which references the development of Interstate 5, which razed the homes of many of Albina’s Black residents in the 1950s.

In the center of the otherwise colorful mural is a square window of black and white.

“I was hoping that I would kind of convey like a portal or a window where people could look from a place of black and white, (without) a lot of possibility,” he said. “A really unimaginative place through the window into a world of color, (where) they can dream and they can see bigger, better, brighter, more beautiful possibilities for their lives and themselves.”

Although it’s also abstract, Chatman’s mural is made up of whirling colors and textures, instead of the geometric shapes that make up Todd’s painting. Despite the aesthetic contrasts, Chatman said that she also draws on natural imagery.

“I’m big into clouds and space and weather and interpreting emotion and thought through weather phenomena,” said Chatman, who moved from Phoenix to Portland in 2020. “It just kind of all comes together into this natural abstraction.”

She said that the personal marks that made it into the original work — fingerprints, hairs from her cat, Panda — made it into the enormous scanned version on the community room’s wall.

The original work is also on display inside the library.

“I feel like traditionally …fine art tends to be in spaces that aren’t as accessible to many audiences,” she said. “So I think it’s just important for art to be in spaces where everyone can see it. … I just want (kids) to know that they can do stuff like this, too.”

— Tatum Todd is a breaking news reporter who covers public safety, crime and community news. Reach them at ttodd@oregonian.com or 503-221-4313.