STEALTH BOAT MOORED ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER LEVEE

IN THE LOWER 9TH WARD

SERVES AS WARNING OF MORE FLOODS TO COME

 

HIGHGROUND, MIDGROUND, LOWGROUND, AND NOGROUND MAPS 

OF GULF COAST COUNTIES AND THE STEALTH HOUSE BOAT AT THE

ART HOUSE ON THE LEVEE, A PROSPECT 4 SATELLITE SITE,  ​

4725 DAUPHINE STREET IN THE LOWER 9TH WARD​

 

​New Orleans, La. November 16, 2017.  Artist and Urban Planner Robert Tannen exhibited as a Coney Island teenager on 10th Street in New York. Later he landed on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, charged with planning its redevelopment after Hurricane Camille in 1969.

Partnering with Boston civil rights leader Mel King for Boston based Metasystems, he worked with a wide range of Mississippians to offer recommendations on how to live more safely in the surge prone area on the Gulf of Mexico. Tannen never left the south, and the recommendations were not enforced until Katrina underscored the wisdom to moving development north of the surge zone.

Settling in New Orleans, Tannen became the city’s first conceptual guru, planned a bridge and historic districts for the city, and sited downtown landmarks such as the Riverwalk, while throwing open the art scene with a first ever loft show in an old church in a declining, (now revived), neighborhood downriver from the French Quarter in 1976.

That show led within two months to the creation of the Contemporary Art Center as Tannen and his wife Jeanne  Nathan pulled artists and arts supporters together to launch an arts district in the once skid row section of the Central Business District.

While still conceptual, his work took on a distinctly Gulf Coast focus as he became informed by the ubiquitous shotgun house form of New Orleans homes, using them as building blocks from small wood houses people could build cities from, to large sheet metal houses he piled on each other as new architecture piled on top of old in the ancient country of Iran where he planned a new coastal community.

At the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency on Captiva Island in 2016 he was offered Rauschenberg’s own studio, paper and printer to generate a series of maps that made visible the highground, midground, lowground and noground in coastal counties from Miami, Florida to Brownsville, Texas.

“To this day people build, buy and rent homes without regard to the elevation of and flood potential of their property. Thus thousands died in Katrina in homes below sealevel,” says Tannen.

“I want people to better understand their exposure to devastating surges and floods that are increasing with ocean rise and the loss of coastal marsh areas that once acted as speed bumps to slow the surges,” said Tannen.

67 maps of the Gulf Coast counties will be available in a book at the Art House on the Levee. On view will also be his water colors comprised of personal caligraphy, and two 16′ long enlarged electrocardiograph prints, overlaid with personal calligraphy that Tannen was able to roll out across Rauschenberg’s expansive studio.

Most ominous, however, is the all black “Stealth House Boat” he created with Aria da Capo, parked in front of the Art House on the Levee, ready to be launched on the Mississippi River when needed for the next dangerous storm to roll up from the Gulf.

This is the third Prospect event at the Art House on the Levee. The first came with P.2 when Tannen, then an official Prospect artist, covered the walls of the double shotgun house with canvasses, put out cans of paint, and invited visitors to “be the artists” in an art process titled “Art by Committee”. The outcome was 20 12′ high by 16′ wide improvisational murals painted by 400 visitors. Many have been donated to schools, community centers and for fundraising auctions for Prospect and other non profits. (See You Tube videos.)

The second was the scene of opening events to view “You Are Here”, a neon sign floating on the river designed by Tavares Strachan who resided at the Art House during P.3.

Despite his profile in New Orleans, and among national artists he has worked with such as Mark DiSuvero, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Lynda Benglis and Ralphael Ortiz; numerous site specific and retrospectives at regional museums, Tannen remains one of the south’s best kept art secrets.

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