Overall I'm less than impressed with the quality of public art in Olympia.

OK, yeah, The Kiss by Richard Beyer at the Percival Landing boardwalk (Fourth Avenue and Water Street) is kind of fun. People love to get their picture taken with the kissing couple. But it's really silly and not great art.

The Park of the Seven Oars by Tom Anderson, Karen Lohmann, Mark Osborne and Joe Tougas (between the two roundabouts going up Harrison hill after crossing the Fourth Avenue bridge) is a nice little urban park, and Tide Pool of Time by Brian Goldbloom and David Vala, also at Percival Landing, is a nice little fountain that kids love to wade in despite signs saying not to. Both are well designed and attractive, but they are more impressive as landscaping than as art.

Simon Kogan's World War II memorial on the Washington State Capitol Campus is well designed and well thought out. The Korean War Memorial by Deborah Copenhaver, also on the Capitol grounds, is a powerful, realistic and gritty depiction of the reality of war that is far better than most monuments of the type.

I don't want to come across as being too snarky, and I have to concede that there may be some wonderful public art works in Olympia that I have not yet seen, but judging from what I have seen, these few works are pretty much it - with one marvelously notable exception: the Olympia Rafah Mural at the corner of Capitol Way and State Avenue in downtown Olympia.

The Olympia Rafah Mural is a huge public art project involving more than 150 artists, activists and social justice organizations from Olympia and across the USA, and even from the West Bank and Gaza in Palestine. The 4,000-square-foot mural was created to honor the legacy of Rachel Corrie, the Olympia native and former Evergreen State College student who was murdered in the Palestinian city of Rafah in Gaza when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the destruction of a Palestinian family home.

Artistically it is monumental and mesmerizing. The central image is a huge olive tree, a universal symbol of peace, whose branches spread across the face of the building and whose leaves are each painted by a different artist or group of artists. Artistically the style and imagery varies from leaf to leaf, yet the whole is a unified image.

Driving by and looking at it from your car is not good enough. In order to appreciate it you must park your car, get out and walk around to view it from different angles, from a distance and up close. The only drawback is no matter how close you get, some of the individual images are hard to see, so I highly recommend that after viewing it in person you visit the project Web site at olympiarafahmural.org.

Olympia Rafah Solidarity Mural Project

Corner of State and Capital Way
Downtown Olympia
Olympiarafahmural.org