New Mural Imagines the Process of Choosing a Non-Partial Jury

Working with King School students, Ralph Pugay’s installation is up on the pedestrian walkway to Hawthorne Bridge

A Long Line of Non-Partial Jurors is now installed in the temporary pedestrian walkway along the SW Main Street entrance to the Hawthorne Bridge. This public art mural was created collaboratively between Ralph Pugay as the lead artist and students from the King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMOCA) project at MLK Jr School in Northeast Portland.

Before this project’s creation, lead artist Ralph Pugay sat in on Judge Nan Waller’s presentation to students at MLK Jr School on her experience being a judge. Pugay, having never gone through the experience of being a juror for a case, found it interesting to imagine how the process of picking a non-partial jury worked. Assuming the student collaborators also have never been through the selection process first-hand, Pugay and the students drew a collection of characters they thought might be able to judge a case in a non-partial manner.

Pugay says, “Looking at all of the drawings, I am excited to see some of the students portraying themselves along with a diversity of other characters who might be different from who they are.” With the students’ images superimposed onto the environment of a courtroom, the now-installed mural is open to the public and can be viewed along the pedestrian walkway along the SW Main Street entrance to the Hawthorne Bridge until early 2020.

You can learn more about Ralph Pugay at ralphpugay.com and KSMOCA at ksmoca.com.

Find more public art pieces around the region by using RACC’s Public Art Search