The Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art is featured in a recent publication by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) entitled How to do Creative Placemaking.

In this field session, Resilient Landscapes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, participants will journey to south Mississippi to study remarkable resilient landscapes. We will explore the Crosby Arboretum, an ASLA award-winning native plant garden designed by Andropogon Associates and Ed Blake, featuring the stunning architecture of AIA Gold Medal recipient Fay Jones. Post-Katrina rebuilding efforts will be explored at the community of Bay St. Louis.  Other trip leaders/speakers include Robert Brzuszek of the Mississippi State University Department of Landscape Architecture and Allison Anderson of Unabridged Architecture.

Robert will speak about the design of the Wetland Education Theater (WET) which will be located adjacent to the Department of Landscape Architecture and the College of Forest Resources on the Mississippi State University Campus.  WET will serve as an educational and research landscape for students and faculty of multiple departments.

In the New Directions in the American Landscape's 26th Annual Conference held a week apart in both Blue Bell, Pennsylvania and New London, Connecticut, and this year entitled Evolving Strategies for Evolving Landscapes:  Beyond the Garden Bed, Robert will participate in a two-part presentation and panel discussion called "Landscape Patterns:  Beauty and the Beasts," with biologist Marc-Andre Villard.  First, Villard will discuss landscape mosaics and how to work with these to preserve wildlife in the context of urban, suburban, and rural settings.  Robert will then expand on the concept of landscape patterns and natural processes, and how with the observance, understanding, and reverence for their inherent artistic forms these can become the driving force for design in a variety of contexts.  Villard and Poore will conclude with a panel discussion centered around the compatibility of these concepts.  The brochure for the symposium can be found here.   

On September 30, the Jackson Free Press named Robert Poore as its "Person of the Day" for his role in the creation of The Art Garden at the Mississippi Museum of Art.  Poore saw his role as helping to realize the vision that his late friend and colleague Ed Blake had developed for the space prior to his untimely passing in 2010.

The brief article about Robert can be viewed using the following link:

www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2011/sep/29/robert-poore/