project overview
Philosophers Garden: Sympathetic Imagination | Douglass High School
Tobacco Brown’s expansive tile mural adds beauty and vibrancy to the entrance of Douglass High School. Tobacco’s work is often focused on nature and gardening. Like cultivating a beautiful garden, high schools are spaces of learning and growth. This mural reminds teachers and students of the way learning nourishes our minds, expanding our thoughts and imaginations.
The mural showcases an innovative canvas executed with porcelain tiles impregnated with digitized photo images. The color is continuous, creating an amazing level of realism. The composition features a natural photographic mural of a garden, with flowering plants, grass, and various foliage. Stones, shells, and mulch add variation, texture, and color to the overall design.
about the artist
Tobacco Brown
Tobacco brown is based in New York City, NY and travels between artist residences, fellowships, workshops, conferences, and communities with shared philosophies. She is a graduate of the University of Memphis and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a TED speaker, Art21 Educator, and environmental activist. She creates works with professional artist paints, nature’s materials, wood, paper, metal, and industrial by-products. In relationship to her social practice projects, civic engagement platforms, and collaborations- we see how the journey of experimentation, small and great triumphs, creates space for new excavations and insights. By inviting local communities to participate in a shared environmental art that combines nature, installation art, written content, and oral history—her art form creates spaces for collaboration, creative problem solving where innovation is born.
Her work as a cultural leader propels artistic immersion and has punctuated this emergence by inspiring others. Tobacco's TED Talk "What gardening taught me about life" was published and launched on the ted.com homepage on May 31, 2018. Her talk has exceeded over 1.3 million views to date and is translated into 21 languages. Tobacco continues to enrich the TED community with content inclusion and contributions to workshops, institute events and TED Ed programming. She is a published Innovative Cultural Fellow at the Caribbean Cultural Center Africa Diaspora Institute in Harlem, New York.
Brown's work for Memphis City Schools and UrbanArt Commission includes the Douglass High School Archival Art Series, which are illuminated historic photographs in the auditorium and gymnasium lobby as well as the Garden Mural, which consist of nontraditional porcelain tiles and digital photographic images of the historic neighborhood and garden for the main entrance.
