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Brenda Brown LANDSCAPE DESIGN ART RESEARCH PROFILE
The work of Brenda Brown Landscape Design Art Research (BBLDAR), founded in 1997, spans design, art and research, but it always concerns landscapes – landscapes as expressions of ecosystem structures and functions, landscapes as experience and idea. The firm’s designs range from an integrated interpretive signage system for the Greater South Florida-Everglades Landscape, to Plaza of the Cicadas, an art/design collaboration with Tillett Lighting Design and architect Maria-Luisa Riviere for Gainesville City Plaza, to exquisite, engaging listening trails in in New Hampshire, Oregon and Florida.  

The work of BBLDAR reflects the interests and experience of its principal, Brenda J. Brown (see vita).  As artist, designer, writer, editor, curator and educator, Ms. Brown has long been concerned with ways in which landscape ecosystem phenomena, processes, relationships and temporalities can be revealed through art and design. Since 2003 she has been particularly concerned with reciprocal revelations of landscapes and sounds. Holding both Master of Fine Arts (Sculpture) and Master of Landscape Architecture degrees, she is currently Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.  

Ms. Brown’s education and experience provide an unusually varied and comprehensive ground for both traditional and innovative landscape projects. BBLDAR’s projects include eco-revelatory design, interpretive design, site design, planting design, landscape history, landscape photography, and fusions of design and art, and one of the firm’s strengths is its ability to thoughtfully span and merge these categorical realms.  Many of BBLDAR’s projects are completed solely by Ms. Brown; others bring to bear the combined talents of several people assembled especially for the project at hand. Brenda Brown’s recent projects include In Situ, an exhibit of works dealing with landscapes and sounds at Selby Gallery at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. In Situ encompassed related and integral installations on the Ringling campus, and was concurrent with Crowley Listening Trail, an installation at Crowley Nature Center, also in Sarasota. Other concurrent events included the premiere of Insect Voices, a work for soprano and chamber ensemble commissioned by Selby Gallery, and on which Ms. Brown collaborated with composer Richard Festinger.
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WORKS
INTRO
CONTACT
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Brenda Brown @ Crowley Creek, fr video by D. Saffer
Brenda Brown learned to cast bronze and iron from Julius Schmidt as a graduate student at the University of Iowa. There she also began her work with site specificity and water in landscapes.  As a graduate student in landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, she worked with editor, Robert B. Riley as assistant editor of Landscape Journal, and began writing about landscapes, their art and architecture. There she also continued to investigate ways to reveal ecosystem phenomena, processes and relationships through
design and art, working with Professors Terry Harkness and Douglas Johnston, with whom she organized the national traveling exhibit, Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed / Nature Revealed. She was editor of that exhibit’s catalog, a special expanded color issue of Landscape Journal.  The exhibit closed at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. in 2000, and won an American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Merit Award in Communications in 1999. Brenda Brown won the ASLA's Bradford Williams Award in 2002.  She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross, Yaddo, Caldera and Ragdale, and was a finalist for the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture in 2003 and 2004.