“TriMet put out an open call in November for artists to put together a proposal to do a tribute for the people affected by what happened here. So, yeah, for me it’s part memorial, part tribute and a reminder to everyone to continue to step up our game in terms of figuring out how to create safer, more welcoming spaces in our city, and to recognize that there is a lot of targeted white supremacy happening in Portland, and that we have this really big opportunity to do better.

Each line is in a different language, so when you stand back, you see kind of like a curvy line and that’s the whole poem, with the idea that you would need people that spoke all of those languages to be standing together in order to read the poem. The languages are Samoli, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, English, Vietnamese, Chinook, and Arabic.

Originally I proposed to do the entire thing in Arabic calligraphy … and my thought about that was to sort of honor this art tradition as a way of breaking down … stereotypes about Islam and challenging Islamophobia, because that was one of the factors that happened in this attack.” – Sarah Farahat, artist

“I am transitioning colors from the sunset, so it’s going from dark blue to light blue, and then down to pink, so I’m going to do some washes and transition it from the stairs. The colors are so bright but we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. I think this area needed some lightening up, some color therapy.” – Nicky Kriara, artist