![]() He was a broad-shouldered, bright-eyed guy, with Santa Claus facial hair and a six-pack of enjoyable eccentricities, one of which-a habit of shouting “Whoop, whoop!” like a mating shorebird-he deployed as an all-purpose greeting and declaration. Besides a good location and better-than-bar-level food, the Goose Hollow also had Clark behind the bar, and everyone loved him. A metric of its popularity: for a while, it was believed to sell more Budweiser per square foot than any other tavern in the United States. In addition to being an occasional male model and a venereal-disease activist, Clark was the proprietor of the Goose Hollow Inn-a cluttered, cozy tavern with wooden booths and oozy Reubens that, since its opening in 1967, had been one of the most popular hangouts in Portland. The poster has sold continually ever since. He sold eight hundred posters that afternoon, and within a few years sold a quarter million more. Ryerson decided to sell the posters for a dollar apiece at a street fair. ![]() Eventually, a board member offered to front the necessary five hundred dollars. (Three people submitted the winner, “Expose Yourself to Art” presumably, they each got eight dollars and thirty-three cents.) Nothing happened with the poster for a while: the Venereal Disease Action Council was a micro-budget undertaking, and there wasn’t enough money to get the poster printed. A neighborhood newspaper then held a contest offering a twenty-five-dollar prize for the best caption. The photographer, Michael Ryerson, shot the picture one morning at dawn, when the sidewalk around the statue was empty, and the light was flat. This, somehow, was the poster that resulted. The council members had already launched one initiative-a T-shirt with the slogan “Zap the Clap”-and they thought a poster might bring awareness to the cause. At the time, Clark was a member of Portland’s Venereal Disease Action Council, which was formed because sexually transmitted infections were spreading like mad among local high-school kids. In those days, the photo was mostly seen as a cheeky prank, but it also had a purpose. The photograph taken of that pose became a ubiquitous poster titled “Expose Yourself to Art.” In it, Clark, dressed in a dark overcoat, a plaid hat, black socks, work boots, and apparently very little else, is seen from behind, canted forward on the balls of his feet, holding his overcoat wide, as he faces a bronze female nude, “Kvinneakt,” on a street in downtown Portland, Oregon. Dorm rooms across America were changed forever in 1978, when John Elwood (Bud) Clark (1931-2022) posed in front of a statue.
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