Brenda Brown

• B.F.A. (Sculpture) (High Honors) (Virginia Commonwealth University)
• M.A., M.F.A. (Sculpture) (University of Iowa)
• M.L.A. (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Brenda Brown describes her work as landscape design art research and “an ongoing grapple to reveal and interpret landscape ecosystem phenomena, processes and relationships.”  These endeavors inevitably involve considerations of human perception, engagement, use and understanding.  For some twenty years she has been particularly concerned with landscape sounds, how they can be revealed and what they can reveal about landscapes’ natural and cultural processes and interactions.  These concerns have expanded to include the names and stories that are told -- and variously heard – concerning landscape phenomena.  Her foci have ranged from the shelterbelts of rural Manitoba and those who live with them; to interacting plant and animal habitats in Mexico, Florida, Oregon and New Hampshire; to the changing forms of Winnipeg’s spring river ice. She draws variously on her education and experience as designer, artist, writer and editor in collaborating with ecologists, composers and other designers, but also in assembling contributors for edited collections and contributing to such collections herself.  Several times she has spent some years developing what she has called “cluster projects” that culminate in interrelated landscape projects (sometimes simultaneous): site works, exhibitions, music premieres, and other presentations and publications that reinforce her objectives and offer diverse angles on the subject at hand. Brown regularly teaches Ecology + Design 2 and Design Research and various studios in the undergraduate Environmental Design Landscape + Urbanism option and graduate Landscape Architecture program.

Her most recent and ongoing project is Manitoba Farmstead Shelterbelts: Stories of Land, Trees, People and Dwelling which has been supported by a generous SSHRC Insight Development grant as well as a University of Manitoba SSHRC Explore grant.  Its documentations include graphics, interviews and video (final edit: one hour, 48 minutes -- with sound) from 23 rural Manitoba properties.  Results include an exhibit whose first venue was the Manitoba Agricultural Museum (four months) and its second the Faculty’s Arch 2 Gallery (three weeks) in 2024.  Brown’s more expansive book on the subject, encompassing stories of land, trees, people and dwelling in Manitoba from the last ice-age end, to Canada’s twentieth century shelterbelt program, to the contemporary material of the exhibition, is currently out for review with the University of Manitoba Press.

She has also edited (and sometimes designed) publications: The book, Landscape Fascinations and Provocations, Reading Robert B. Riley, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2023; Tzintzuntzan, el lugar de los colibríes – otra vez / Tzintzuntzan, place of the hummingbirds – again, which also served as a catalogue to her exhibit at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Alfredo Zalce in Morelia, Mexico was published by Estampas in 2015;  the 1998 Special issue of Landscape Journal, Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed a catalogue for the exhibition of the same name. (This project received a Merit Award from the Society of Landscape Architects.)

Other notable design/art works since Brown joined the Faculty have included site works, videos and multi-media exhibitions. “Hearing the Wind: Chaco Canyon”, a video, was composed from her documentations at New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park while artist in residence there along with subsequent interviews with residents of the Four Corners region. Together with twelve related prints, it comprised the exhibition, Minding the Ground; Hearing the Wind: Chaco Canyon, at the park visitor center in 2018.  The video has since been presented at symposia in Canada and Mexico.  Brown’s hummingbird habitat restoration project at Mexico’s Tzintzuntzan National Archeological site, a collaboration with restoration ecologist Roberto Lindig-Cisneros, continued for almost nine years and resulted in extended multimedia exhibit venues at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Alfredo Zalce, and the Tzintzuntzan Archaeological site in 2015 and 2016, as well as a competition and concert at the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS), and partial landscape design realization in 2017. Spring Ice (2010), was the product of two seasons documenting Winnipeg rivers’ spring ice breakup in sound recordings and photographs.  Comprised of three complex sound and video installations on the University of Manitoba campus and one that played inside and outside the entrance of Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art, Spring Ice also encompassed two new musical works that incorporated Brown’s sound recordings, one by composer Richard Festinger, the other by composer Michael Matthews.  In 2008, her simultaneous Ringling Listening Garden Inside/Outside at Ringling College of Art and Design’s Selby Gallery in Sarasota, and Crowley Listening Trail in Myyaka, Florida, coincided with another collaboration with composer Richard Festinger, “Insect Voices”, which premiered at the exhibition opening.

Edited works to which Brown has contributed essays include Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods, Actions, Tools, edited by Thomas Oles and Paula Horrigan (Routledge 2024); Landscape Observatory: The Work of Terence Harkness, edited by M. Elen Deming (ORO Publications, 2017); Music in Architecture/ Architecture in Music, edited by Michael Benedikt (Center for American Architecture & Design, 2014); Theme Park Landscapes: Antecedents and Variations, edited by Terence Young and Robert Riley (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002); Perfect Unity (Laumeier Sculpture Park, 1996).  Brown’s essays are also included in the works she has edited.

Brown’s additional publications and presentations are extensive and varied.  Her articles and reviews span some 30 years and have appeared in Landscape Journal, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Landscapes/Paysages, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Ecological Restoration and Sculpture, and she has presented at conferences and symposia in Canada, the United States, Mexico, the Czech Republic and Poland. Brown is a two-time finalist for the Rome Prize, has been artist-in residence at Riding Mountain National Park, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS), and Caldera, and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and Ucross.

An excerpt from Brown’s recent video, “Manitoba Farmstead Shelterbelts: Stories of Land, Trees, People and Dwelling”, can be seen and heard at https://bbldar.com/shelterbeltvideo.html
Documentations of earlier works can be found on her website: https://www.bbldar.com/