Bob Braine
Landscape is now the site of deeply conflicting ideas about the natural world and our relationship to it. It is the consequences of this relationship that I document in my practice. I’m depicting the tangled spot where the perfect design of nature collides with the clumsy arrangements of twentieth century man. –Bob Braine
In 2016, Bob Braine was commissioned to create Habitat Fountains (working title) as part of CALL’s Daylighting Tibbetts Brook program. Habitat Fountains recreates elements of the lost riparian landscape, buried springs, and Tibbetts brook itself in order to engage people imaginatively in the daylighting of Tibbetts Brook. In 2018, Braine developed Estuary Tattoos, which maps the trajectory of Tibbetts Brook with tattoo ink used as body paint. By making residents into works of art, Braine’s works help them visualize and viscerally understand what the estuary was before urbanization, the way it currently is with diagrams of the sewer systems, and the way it could be if daylighted.
Braine has exhibited at the Queens Museum of the Arts and MOMA PS1, and in Europe he has worked with the Gallery for Landscape Art in Hamburg, Germany; exhibited at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany; Al Almere, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Wien, Karlsplatz, Vienna; and at the Villa Medici, Rome.
Rescuing Tibbetts Brook: Estuary Tattoos — Fall 2018
With his Estuary Tattoos, artist Bob Braine maps both the history and the future of Tibbetts Brook and its surrounding wetlands on the bodies of local NorthWest Bronx residents through a series of body-painting events throughout the summer and early fall of 2018.
By making local residents themselves into works of art, Braine helped them visualize and understand the estuary on a visceral level, the way it once was, before urbanization; the way it currently is with diagrams of the sewer systems; and the way it can be through the future daylighting of Tibbetts Brook.
This work is part of CALL’s larger initiative in the Bronx: Rescuing Tibbetts Brook, a constellation of artist and designer-led projects that raise awareness of and engage the community in plans to remove Tibet’s Brook form the sewer system and restore it as a surface-level naturalized stream connecting from Van Cortlandt Park to the Harlem River.
CALL/ WALK: Ruminations on Extinct Topography — Fall 2015
Artist Bob Braine, plant ecologist Rebecca Swadek, and botanist George Jackman, focused on stream resiliency and fish habitat. They discuss the history of Tibbets Brook, the ecology of the of marble hill and the contemporary connection the neighborhood has to the water.
This walk is a part of CALL/WALKS, an ongoing series of artist and scientist led public walks diving deep into urgent, local environmental concerns and innovative ideas to overcome them. This particular walk connects to CALL’s larger initiative in the Broadway: 1000 Steps
Other Rescuing Tibbetts Brook Artists
