(Sarah Farahat/TriMet)
A Portland artist has been tapped to create a semi-permanent memorial to honor the victims and survivors of a deadly 2017 knife attack aboard a MAX train, TriMet announced Thursday.
An advisory committee picked Sarah Farahat over three other finalists to oversee the memorial at the Hollywood MAX station in Northeast Portland.
The design isn’t final; it will be fine-tuned over the next several months with feedback from the committee and the families of the victims of the attack. The mural is expected to be in place by the end of the year.
(Sarah Farahat/TriMet)
The mural will be a temporary fixture. The transit center was already scheduled for a renovation in coming years.
Farahat earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and a master’s degree at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
The concept includes an excerpt from “Mural,” a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, against images of sprouting sunflowers.
“I have a very committed team of artists, educators and activists that will come together in the next few months to not only create a beautiful memorial, but also to cultivate further understanding across differences to celebrate our city’s richly diverse cultural heritage, and to demonstrate the fierce love that Portlanders are learning to show for each other in these difficult times,” Farahat said in a statement.
(Sarah Farahat/TriMet)
TriMet also plans to install a 3-by-5-foot plaque that will be unveiled on May 26, the one-year anniversary of the attack. It will include images of the impromptu memorial that sprung up at the transit center, which included flowers and chalked messages.
The transit agency, after consulting with victims’ families, commissioned designer John Laursen to create the plaque of porcelain enamel and steel.
All four memorial concepts evoked the chalked messages of love and tolerance that appeared at Hollywood Transit Center in the wake of the attack.
Two included versions of the reported last words of one of the men killed in the attack, 23-year-old Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche: "Tell everyone on this train that I love them."
A memorial of chalk messages, photographs, handwritten notes, flowers, candles and stuffed animals occupy the Hollywood Transit Center days after a knife attack left two men dead and another injured. (Stephanie Yao Long/Staff)
Namkai-Meche and Rick Best, 53, were fatally stabbed after intervening when a man hurled slurs at two teenage girls, police said. A third man, Micah Fletcher, was seriously injured.
The stabbings occurred on a moving train. The victims were tended to by other riders and first responders at the Hollywood Transit Station.
Jeremy Christian exited the train at the stop and arrested a short time later. He has been charged with aggravated murder and remains jailed pending a 2019 trial.
-- Elliot Njus
enjus@oregonian.com
503-294-5034
@enjus
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