Alex Braden

Be As Water

est. completion Summer 2025

LED Mesh, Fixtures, and Custom electronics

Approx. 17,000 sq. ft.

Arthur Ave. at I-65, North Nashville, TN

This project is over two years in coming for me; but it’s been over a decade for folks like M. Simone Boyd whose enduring labor made this possible. And for the local elders and lifelong neighbors of this long-neglected site it’s been multiple generations since the building of I-65 razed homes, displaced residents, bisected and cut off a thriving black neighborhood— a cultural and intellectual hub boasting three HBCUs and a destination music scene— from the rest of Nashville.

Ages ago, ruling classes used moats to hoard resources, often from the same working classes who built their silos. Siege— the historical (and contemporary) combat practice of barring passage, cutting off resources… invasion by blight— is another apt comparison.

In theory, a highway is supposed to connect. But this road was built to be a barrier. An invasive power laid siege to this community, tried to cut it off, to isolate it, to dry it up. But through creativity, adaptation, and resilience, those north and west of the Arthur Avenue underpass refused to be dammed. 

Be As Water is a light-based piece but it starts with sound. The site itself has a remarkable, oceanic roar of its own. But long before the interstate, the neighborhood made waves via the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet who pioneered the first ever recording of “Down by the Riverside.” Later reimagined by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Godmother of Rock and Roll herself, that same song would inspire musings on water as a model for resilience by Ursula K. LeGuin. “Water doesn’t have only one way. It has infinite ways, it takes whatever way it can, it is utterly opportunistic, and all life on earth depends on this passive, yielding, uncertain, adaptable, changeable element.” The programming patterns of these 10,000+ LED nodes, modeled after tidal cross currents, are beneficiaries of these histories and ideas. 

This project would not be possible without Anne-Leslie Owens, Anna Dearman, Alex Cooper, Samantha Slone, and many more: thank you.