Tomie Arai's “Back to the Garden” consists of 24 faceted glass windows at Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. The work contains seasonal floral imagery-spring blossoms, summertime wallflowers, and autumn foliage. The species shown are common to the area of Pelham Parkway, which links Pelham Bay Park with the Bronx Zoo, and New York Botanical Garden. Highlighting the historic nature of the station and the community, Arai insets historic black and white photographs into her colorful images. The photos have been screened and fired onto the glass surface. Taken from archival photographs, they span the period from 1899 to 1969 and capture views of the surrounding streets and buildings. The artwork's title refers to lyrics in a Joni Mitchell song about returning to the simple life, the life back in the garden.

Tomie Arai is a an artist who lives and works in NYC. She has designed both temporary and permanent public works of art for Creative Time, the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, the NYC Percent for Art Program, the Cambridge Arts Council, the New York City Board of Education and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Japanese American National Museum, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has been a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Printmaking, a Joan Mitchell Visual Arts Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper. In 2015, she co-founded the cultural collective, The Chinatown Art Brigade with artists Betty Yu and ManSee Kong.  Ibn 2016, she received a National Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art.