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Art Fills the Void, the banana wall mural along Southeast 12th Avenue at Division Street, isn’t the most intricate or ambitious street art in Portland, or even in its neighborhood. That title probably goes to Attitude of Gratitude, the towering woman with her hands in prayer and living plants for hair, standing just three blocks away.
But Art Fills the Void is the oldest surviving street mural in town. It’s a remnant of Old Portland that has served as a landmark of the Hosford-Abernethy neighborhood since its creation by anonymous art crew Gorilla Wallflare back in 1982.
In November, the mural survived a vicious attack by taggers, who vandalized nearly the entire length of the banana, about 25 feet. Portland Street Art Alliance, a nonprofit that helps care for existing murals and facilitates new ones, leapt into action, pressure-washing the wall and reapplying its protective clear coat. The group even started a GoFundMe for its future maintenance, more than doubling its modest $1,000 goal within days.
But now, the banana could face more trouble than just a temporary bruise from a can of spray paint.
The retail and office building built in 1965 at 1125 SE Division St. on which Art Fills the Void is painted sold Feb. 12. Over the years, the building has contained businesses like Portobello Vegan Trattoria and pop-up Heart Bar, along with the popular Israeli vegetarian restaurant Aviv and BeerMongers bottle shop—all of which have since closed or moved. One of the few remaining tenants, Rachael Peterson of Invoke Salon, has heard the building needs extensive seismic upgrades to get it up to code in case of an earthquake. “I was told they can’t be done with tenants in here,” Peterson says.
The new owners are Jason Taylor and Derek DeBorde of Hood River, who also own local burger chains Mike’s Drive-In and Big Jim’s Drive-In in The Dalles and Hood River. The duo got the Portland property for a steal at $750,000, a serious tumble in value from the previous sale price of $2.95 million in 2015. Regarding seismic upgrades, Taylor says he has a lawyer working on that with the city.
“There’s a lot of question marks there,” Taylor says.
The empty storefronts, new owners and potential seismic upgrades have Peterson concerned about the future of her business (which she recently sank $60,000 into remodeling). Then, there’s the question of the banana mural.
Portland Street Art Alliance is working to legally protect Art Fills the Void to ensure it doesn’t get torn down. Tiffany Conklin, PSAA’s executive director, thinks there should be an informative plaque on the art.
“This is the only mural we have a maintenance fund for—it’s a special case,” Conklin says. “It’s the only one in town that we maintain that’s not ours. And that’s because it’s part of our history.”
“Gorilla Wallflare has set out to fill the dull gray void of Portland’s blank walls,” said the anonymous letter sent to The Oregonian in 1982 after the art attack.
The crew comprised husband-and-wife team Frank and Rowan DeSantis and others, who painted the mural without permission in broad daylight wearing caution vests, Conklin says.
Frank and Rowan’s son, Zoe DeSantis, 40, remembers hanging Christmas ornaments that featured all of his parents’ murals on them—Gorilla Wallflare went on to paint a fingerprint on a building at Southeast 28th Avenue and Belmont Street in 1983 and a cartoon-style explosion near the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge in 1985. And that was the end of it. The banana’s the only mural left standing.
“They did wild stuff all the time,” DeSantis says. “They were crazy artists living in the ’80s, just having fun.”
DeSantis’ parents divorced when he was 7. Frank DeSantis died in 2018, after a career in graphic design and photography, doing work for such businesses as OMSI and Reser’s Fine Foods. Rowan DeSantis is still an active artist in the Pacific Northwest, and her son went on to become an artist too— Zoe DeSantis often incorporates bananas into his own paintings, in tribute to his family.
When PSAA reached out to him to help protect Art Fills the Void, DeSantis responded quickly to help, offering to touch up the banana if necessary. It would be an honor to work on his parents’ mural and keep their art alive, he says.
“I know that towards the end of my father’s life, he had expressed that whatever happens to it happens to it,” DeSantis says. “He didn’t want a legacy. He didn’t want to be famous for it. He just wanted to do something fun that people would enjoy.”
Meanwhile, PSAA is busy shoring up paperwork to protect the banana. Conklin and her bunch, including a copyright lawyer working pro bono, have registered the mural for copyright protection with the U.S. Copyright Office. The application is under review.
The ultimate goal, Conklin says, is to secure the mural’s legal protections under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. That way, PSAA could issue a legal notice to the new building owners asserting the artistic value of the mural, meaning that the owners could not remove or destroy the mural without proper consideration. (PSAA is open to either preserving the mural in its current location or repainting it on a new wall on that corner lot, if it is redeveloped.)
As for the fate of the building itself, Taylor says the plan is to use it as the headquarters for Mike’s Drive-In since the company has outgrown its South Macadam Avenue offices.
“I have no intention of tearing the building down,” Taylor says. “That’s why I bought it: to move into it.”
The long-term picture is a little fuzzier, though. Regarding Invoke Salon’s lease, which goes through 2028, he wouldn’t make any guarantees. Taylor is not actively pursuing a Hosford-Abernethy location of Mike’s Drive-In, but does note that it’s a “great traffic corner” that used to have a lot of restaurants on it.
Taylor is curious to learn more about Art Fills the Void, but didn’t seem thrilled about the idea of PSAA registering it with the feds.
“I think it’s pretty cool—I don’t know anything about it,” he says. “I’m very curious about the banana itself.”
Regardless of it being his parents’ art, DeSantis as a Portland kid hopes the banana survives the change of hands.
“It would be a loss,” he says. “With growing up here, there’s so much of the city that is unrecognizable. That’s one of the few things left that is still a marker. It’s a little piece of home.”