Robert Tannen is an artist, economic and urban development and design specialist, planner and community activist whose 60 year artistic, professional and community service career has resulted in more than $3 billion of public/private projects in the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast.
He has produced major new innovative art works since his high school years when be began showing installation projects on Tenth Street in New York City when the abstract expressionist movement was just beginning to be challenged by a younger generation working with conceptual, performance and installation art. Fatherhood at a young age took him out of the New York art market, but did not end his original art creations. Whether constructions of beach debris, wrapped objects, animals suspended in plastic bags of formaldehyde, furniture covered in rags dipped in resin, large scale works out of tractor tires, concrete blocks, or sheet metal “archisculptures”, Tannen’s work has preceded related work by better known artists.
He forged plans for the Gulf Coast restoration after Camille; led environmental studies and an open land use and transportation regional planning process for the New Orleans metropolitan area; designed ramps for a new New Orleans bridge designed to save neighborhoods; managed creation of a city wide neighborhoods historic districts plan; chose the riverfront site for the 1984 Louisiana World Expo that led to a transformation of the New Orleans Riverfront; and stimulated and helped realize riverfront and downtown festival and retail projects, parks, hotels, an arena next to the Superdome, and a riverfront street car system..
1961 B.I.D. (Bachelor in Industrial Design), Environmental Design, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
General Motors Scholarship for Undergraduate Study in Design
1963 M.F.A., Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, 1963
1963 Graduate studies in philosophy, Columbia University, 1963
1963 Graduate studies in psychology, New York University, 1963
1960-63 Instructor in Design and Sculpture, Art School and School of Building Science, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
1963-65 Arts, Architecture and Core Curriculum Instructor and Founding Faculty Member, Franconia College, Franconia, NH
1965-Present Artist, Urban Designer and Regional Planner
1966 Manager Lazy Eight Inc, R&D Group, MA
1976 Co-founder of the Contemporary Arts Center with Jeanne Nathan, New Orleans, LA
1988-92 Visiting professor in Urban Design, Tulane School of Architecture, New Orleans, LA
2003 Co Founder, Downtown Neighborhoods Improvement Association
2005- Present, consultant, RAND Corporation and CDMSmith engineering