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A mural chronicling the journey of a sockeye salmon recently joined the ranks of Portland International Airport's works of art.
The mural comes as part of the Center for Biological Diversity's national Endangered Species Mural Project, which increases awareness and appreciation for endangered species through a series of paintings around the country.
Local artist Roger Peet, who heads the project, installed a 15-foot-tall exhibit to commemorate the sockeye salmon. The installation, titled "Sockeye Salmon Bring the Ocean to the Mountains," includes nine canvas panels and is on display in Concourse D at the Portland International Airport.
"It focuses on the role of a species inside its ecological niche," Peet says. He explains that the sockeye salmon bring a lot of nutrients to the environment of the Columbia river, and how the damming process has interrupted the salmon's journey upstream. "The nine panels are trying to evoke the cycle the salmon is at the center of," he says.
The installation will be up for a year, when PDX will consider whether or not they want to make it permanent.
Earlier this year, Peet installed a mural of a Dakota skipper butterfly at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. The mural is now at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
Other murals in the project include of the mountain caribou in Sandpoint, Idaho; the monarch butterfly in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the humpback whale and the yellow-billed cuckoo in Los Angeles and the jaguar in Tucson, Arizona.
