Cooperation
—Michihiro Kosuge, 1998
Michihiro Kosuge’s standing stones and boulders reflect the Riverpoint Campus’s landscape and its basalt rock outcroppings—a distinctive local feature.
Kosuge reminds us that Cooperation uses very old material and points out that though higher education aims toward the future, it is appropriate to remember our past.
Likewise, the carved and textured surfaces of the boulders recall pictographs created by the region’s first inhabitants.
Kosuge was born in Tokyo in 1943. He is currently a professor at Portland State University and has acted as a visiting artist at the School of Art in Chicago, the Center for Creative Studies/College of Art and Design in Detroit, Montana State University, and the Oregon School of Design.
He received a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982–1983) and an International Scholarship from the San Francisco Art Institute. Sculpture magazine calls Kosuge “one of the most accomplished of Pacific Northwest artists” (2006).
Location: Adjacent to the Phase I and Health Sciences buildings.
See a night-time image of the standing stones, by John D. Moore, CPP