2016 Bronx Presentation

CALL/City as Living Laboratory and the CALL/BRONX Steering Committee Members invite you to presentations on: Rescue of Tibbetts Brook & Gardens of Engagement Monday November 28, 6-8PM Manhattan College, Fishbach Room in the Leo Engineering Building th

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3825 Corlear Ave., Bronx, New York (one block west of 238 Street & Broadway, subway #1 @ 238 Street)

Refreshments will be served Please join us for presentations by four teams who have proposed projects to make sustainability tangible through the arts focused on daylighting Tibbett’s Brook, a local community priority, and .and expanding the scope of community gardens in a local school and public housing development. The four teams are led by SLO Architecture, Bob Braine, Mary Mattingly and Juanli Carrion. Their project concepts emerged from a fall 2015 workshop organized by CALL at Horace Mann. CALL has been working since early 2016 to raise funds for the projects and is pleased to announce the receipt of two seed grants from the New York State Arts Council and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.

Finding Tibbetts Brook: Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi of SLO Architecture, in cooperation with Theo Barbagianis, of eDesign Dynamics, will create a micro wetlands on three truck beds on the top level of the parking lot of the Target store at 225th Street in the Bronx, with active support from the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park, and from other collaborating artists. The micro-wetland will function not only as a social space, but as a small-scale means to contain run-off from the parking lot and reintroduce native species back into the neighborhood.

Habitat Fountains (working title): Eco-artist Bob Braine will lead this effort to create two small water habitats in the guise of fountains, one in a publicly or privately owned, paved-over open space in Marble Hill near Van Cortlandt Park and the other situated further south (downstream) closer to the Harlem River. These installations will focus attention and imagination on possibilities associated with the daylighting of Tibbetts Brook. Braine will be aided by George Jackman, a CUNY professor of fisheries biology, and by Rebecca Swadek, a botanist with the New York City Parks Department.

Outer Seed Shadow #03: This garden-based project is being organized by Juanli Carrion. Carrion’s Outer Seed projects are based on extensive video interviews with residents who live near the site. Carrion will interview residents of Marble Hill Houses, a public housing project, and the garden will be located on the grounds of the NYCHA Houses. The residents will be asked to tell their stories, explaining how they arrived in the area, including experiences with immigration, where appropriate, and how they feel about the terms of coexistence with others in the area. Interviewee’s are asked to name an edible plant to be included in the garden. The plants will be arranged in a way that reflects where the interviewees live in relation to each other.

CALL/BRONX STEERING COMMITTEE: Gabriel de Guzman, Robert Fanuzzi, Jacki Fisher, Christina Taylor

Finding Tibbetts Brook Pop-up Wetlands

Upland Habitat Fountain

Outer Seed Shadow #1, 2014

DeWitt Clinton Food Forest: The Food Forest will be an edible forest on public land on the campus of DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where community gardening and sustainability are well established practices. It will be built through the efforts of a diverse group of talents, among them: Mary Mattingly, an artist who has focused on environmental themes; Ursula Chanse, director of Bronx Green-Up and Community Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, and Raymond Pultinas, a teacher of English and school gardener at DeWitt Clinton, as well as author of the Witt Seminar on Sustainability in Schools, at http://wittseminar.blogspot.com. With the support of the high school administration, the team will utilize four areas on the high school grounds pre-approved for public gardens – approximately ½ acre in total.

ABOUT CALL CALL/City as Living Laboratory combines the skills and perspectives of artists and designers with those of scientists and citizens to create public programs and projects that increase awareness and action around key environmental issues.

Internationally renowned artist Mary Miss founded CALL in 2009, with the goal of harnessing the creative vision of artists and designers to combat the rapid deterioration of our environment.

BIOGRAPHIES ALEXANDER LEVI AND AMANDA SCHACHTER are co-founders and principals of SLO Architecture. They founded the firm in Madrid in 2005 and have been based in New York City since 2007. Native New Yorkers, they were named winners of New Practices New York 2012, a biennial award of the NY Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In 2011, they received an MCAF grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for Harvest Dome, a floating public artwork for the Inwood Hill Park Inlet in Manhattan.

BOB BRAINE is an artist who has traveled extensively in Central and South America, Europe and the US generating photographs, drawings and site specific interventions based on the fractured utopia of compromised ecosystems. Braine has exhibited in the US at venues such as the Queens Museum of Art (Crossing the Line) and PS1 (Greater NY). In Europe he has worked extensively with the Gallery for Landscape Art in Hamburg, Germany.

JUANLI CARRION earned his MFA at Polytechnic University in Valencia, Spain, in 2008, and has since developed into a multimedia artist respected on both sides of the Atlantic, with solo exhibitions in 2015 at both the La Nau gallery in Valencia and at Y Gallery in New York. Carrion has received many awards, grants and residencies, including Grant for Contemporary Art from Consulado General de España en Nueva York in 2014 and PICE Grant from Spanish Cultural Action Agency in 2013.

MARY MATTINGLY is an artist who creates, among other things, living-systems that incorporate rainwater collection that cycle water through edible gardens, solar panels, and enclosed living spaces. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. She is currently working on a floating food forest for New York called “Swale” and recently completed a two-part sculpture “Pull” for the International Havana Biennial with the Museo National de Belles Artes de la Habana and the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Draft 11/9/16/16

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