Matthew López-Jensen
Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based environmental artist, photographer, educator, Citizen Pruner, and community gardener. His projects combine walking, collecting, mapping, and extensive research. He is particularly interested in the relationships between people and local landscapes. As a recent artist-in-resident at the NYC Urban Field Station, he spent two years photographing street trees and acts of stewardship. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography and his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions.
Featured in the Lincoln Center’s Ildiko Butler Gallery is a recent walking-based artist project exploring Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. The map, completely redesigned by the artist, centers an experience in the landscape around beech trees struggling to survive. The adjacent photographs are some of the trees featured on
the map.
Other landscape works featured on the web version of the show are The Gods Are Watching, two mask-like photographs of seashells in front of a wall of ocean trash collected from the coast of Pelham Bay Park. Three Wonder Walks features bundles of plants and objects collected and documented at different coastal landscapes throughout New York City. An artist map of the respective landscapes accompanied each bundle. Tree Love: Street Trees and Stewardship in New York City is a sprawling series documenting urban trees and the moments of care and stewardship found around them.
López-Jensen teaches Art and Action on the Bronx River and Visual Thinking at Fordham.