HEALING LANDSCAPES
Collaborative Environmental Social Practice Art in the Bronx
Matthew López-Jensen, Artist
Featuring works created in collaboration with students from World View High School, co-teacher Deborah Reich, artist Ana de la Cueva, volunteer embroiderers from the Bronx and beyond, with support from City As Living Laboratory, and on landscapes stewarded by The James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center, Friends of Mosholu Parkway, and a collection of dedicated neighbors.
Healing Landscapes features a collection of works from two ambitious, long-term projects by artist Matthew López-Jensen. The Tibbetts Estuary Tapestry is a unique example of community-embroidered textile art. The tapestry is an aerial map of the Bronx neighborhoods along Broadway between Van Cortland Park and the Harlem River. Most of this landscape was once an ecologically rich estuary with Tibbetts Brook winding its way to the Harlem River. Decades ago, the stream was diverted into the sewer system and the surrounding land was filled and developed. The neighborhoods are now prone to severe flooding. To alleviate this problem, New York City has begun the process of “daylighting” the stream. Over the next ten years the stream will be designed to flow through a narrow, publicly accessible parkway system. The Tibbetts Estuary Tapestry instigates this future project by taking the idea further. What would happen if all the flat rooftops in the area were designed as greenroofs? Each square used to construct the 15-foot-long tapestry was stitched by a different volunteer asked to imagine a greener future. The stitches were inspired by a collection of 14 plants that would thrive on rooftops in our climate zone and the final piece is full of surprises.
Mosholu Forest Stories is a collection of photographs and ephemera derived from López-Jensen’s ongoing work with a 20-acre section of forested land at the northern end of Mosholu Parkway. Five years ago, the landscape was an inaccessible mess full of massive dumpsites and covered in vines. The slow restoration of this natural resource has been a community-building endeavor. Vines have been cleared, trees planted, and trails now encourage access. Over the past five years López-Jensen has led educational walks, clean-ups, and seed plantings. The photographs on view were taken with and by high school students from World View High School. With support from Montefiore, López-Jensen created and co-taught an elective titled Photography, Environment, and Social Justice. The course immersed students in the foundations of photography while they studied and photographed the adjacent gardens and forest.
Artist Biography
Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based, interdisciplinary environmental artist whose projects combine social practice, walking, photography, teaching, planting, cleaning, mapping, and research. He is a Citizen Pruner, New York City Parks Super Steward, community gardener, and environmental advocate. The inspiration behind his work is a deep connection to the natural world and an impulse to improve and deepen community access to local landscapes. The works on exhibit at the Gallery of ARTFul Medicine explore landscapes in the Bronx, particularly The Mosholu Teaching Forest on Mosholu Parkway and the Tibbetts Brook watershed and its future path to the Harlem River.
López-Jensen is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and his site-specific landscape projects have twice been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been commissioned to create artworks by The High Line, Waterfront Alliance, New York Botanical Garden, Brandywine Museum of Art, City as Living Laboratory, Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Montefiore Hospital’s Einstein Campus, among others. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. López-Jensen teaches environmental art and photography at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design. His course, Art and Action on the Bronx River, allows students to learn and find inspiration from this important local waterway.
López-Jensen was the 2023 artist-in-residence with the Erie Canal and his forthcoming book The Work and the Water: Labor and Landscapes Along the Erie Canal will be published in June of 2025. He has also participated in residency programs at MacDowell, New York City Urban Field Station, Guild Hall, the Queens Museum, Wave Hill, L.M.C.C., among others. He received his MFA from the University of Connecticut and BA from Rice University.
You can follow the artist’s work on Instagram @mattlopezjensen
The Tibbetts Estuary Tapestry
The Tibbetts Estuary Tapestry is a collectively embroidered quilt, conceived by artists Matthew López-Jensen and Ana de la Cueva, and completed with the help of 95 volunteers from the Bronx and beyond. The tapestry features a strip of land in the Northwest Bronx that was, until the early 1900s, an ecologically rich tidal estuary. The blue line that runs horizontally through the map depicts the approximate course that Tibbetts Brook will take once it has been rerouted above ground or “daylighted” as it is commonly called. The rectangular and angular shapes on the map are the outlines of the many large, flat-rooftops buildings that populate the city blocks from Van Cortlandt Park to the Harlem River. Volunteer participants embroidered these roofs and other spaces with imagined gardens. The stitches are based on plants that would thrive on rooftops in this region like goldenrod, sedum, eastern prickly pear, shaggy golden asters, and yucca.
The tapestry is a work of art that posits creative green solutions and it shines a light on the relationship between our built environment and persistent flooding in this corridor along Broadway. The former estuary acted like a natural sponge to soak up large rainfalls. But today, with Tibbetts Brook diverted into the sewer and so much of the landscape paved over, large rain events become dangerous and costly floods. Green roofs on these expansive buildings would help mitigate storm water, insulate the buildings, cool the neighborhood, and provide habitat for a range of plants, insects, and birds.
