TREE MUSEUM

Artist Katie Holten has an amazing project on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx called TREE MUSEUM.  100 hundred trees along the 4.5 miles stretch of the Concourse now have signs with instructions on how to access an audio guide via your cell phone.  The audio guide features the voices of community members, super stars like DJ Jazzy Jay, the Bronx historian Lloyd Ultan, scientists like Eric Sanderson and Uli Lorimer, architects like Daniel Liebskind, among others.

It also features my haiku poetry.  Almost a year ago, when Katie told me about her project, I asked her if I could write poems around it and it started me on a six-month-plus project to write haiku about the trees on the Concourse.  The Challenge I gave myself was to only write while I was walking the Concourse.  So I logged about 20 miles on the Concourse, wrote over a hundred haiku, and hope to have a small collection of 40 poems as soon as I lay them out and self-publish them, which I don't know how to do but will figure out.  If anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

All artists make something out of nothing.  But one of the things that is so beguiling about Katie's work is that it transforms nothing into goodwill.  That may sound like an exaggeration, but the TREE MUSEUM is bringing together a very diverse group of people to share their work and stories, bringing artists into the Grand Concourse to lead projects in the community for the community, and bringing participants together to collaborate.  Her work feels like more than the sum of its parts, and you will have to check it out for yourself online at 

http://www.treemuseum.org/

Join the TREE MUSEUM community:

http://treemuseum.ning.com/

Come out for the opening on Sunday, June 21, Father's Day, at 5pm:

http://www.treemuseum.org/when.html