Fallen Fruit
Fallen Fruit is a Los Angeles based artists' collaboration composed of David Allen Burns and Austin Young. The project was originally conceived by David Allen Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young in 2004. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work installing public artworks and participating in exhibitions worldwide. Using photography and video as well as performance and installation art, Fallen Fruit's work focuses on urban space, neighborhood, located citizenship and community and their relationship to the public realm.
History and Background
Taking their name from the book of Leviticus, Fallen Fruit began in 2004 as a response to a call by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest for artists' projects that addressed social or political issues but did so in the form of proposing a solution rather than raising a critique. In 2008, as part of their participation in "The Gatherers" show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the group embarked on a new long-term project called "The Colonial History of Fruit". Using a variety of media, this work examines both the objective or factual history of fruit – how the fruit we eat traveled through time and space to arrive in our daily life – and the subjective or anecdotal history: how and when an individual first tasted a fruit, or how a certain tree was tended by one family, or remembered by immigrants.Collaboration
Fallen Fruit strives to extend their collaboration into the public realm through projects that involve and engage with the public. Public Fruit Jams are perhaps the best example of the artists' investment in new forms of collaboration. Held several times a year, Public Fruit Jams are an open invitation to the "citizens" of the city to bring their home-grown or publicly picked fruit and join together in a communal jam-making session, using the term "jam" as a riff on both the food and the idea of musical improvisation. Working without recipes small groups are asked to negotiate on which fruits go into the mix of the jam. The finished jars are then exchanged among participants and visitors so that almost everyone leaves with jam. For Fallen Fruit, the "art" involved here is less the jam itself than the social encounters and exchanges that the jam occasions. Fallen Fruit has held Public Fruit Jams at private institutions such as LACMA, and in public places throughout Los Angeles as well as in Santa Monica, San Francisco, San Diego, Pasadena, and in Linz, Austria, as part of the Arts Electronica Festival.Originally initiated in relation to a project with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2013, Lemonade Stand, activates the phrase… “when life gives you lemons…” through public engagement. In his recurring project, participants are given glasses of organic lemonade in exchange for drawing a self-portrait onto a lemon with black marker and allowing their portrait to be taken. Collectively the lemon self-portraits are meant to create new forms of "public" and temporary micro-communities that illustrate some of the archetypes of society through their varied forms.
In 2013 Fallen Fruit created the Fruitique!, a collaborative, site-specific art installation, exhibition and retail space in conjunction with the Hammer Museum's Arts Re:STORE LA 2050 project. The project combined curated and consigned art works that use fruit as the main thematic element into an installation that uses Fallen Fruit wallpaper patterns as a common ground. The space also served as Fallen Fruit's temporary headquarters until its closure at the end of 2014.
Fallen Fruit Factory is a public participatory art project that allows the public to collaborate with Fallen Fruit, contemporary artists, and each other to create fast-art pieces through varying combinations of paint and fruit-based collage. The project creates an immersive art experience where the public can participate in making Exquisite corpse like group-authored works of art.
Fallen Fruit's other public projects also include Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Public Fruit Tree Adoptions that enjoin the public to plant trees on the margins of private property; and Neighborhood Infusions, which takes the fruit found on one street or neighborhood and infuses it in alcohol to capture the "spirit" of the place.
Public fruit
Fallen Fruit first coined the term "public fruit" in 2004 in order to explore the concept of fruit found growing in or overhanging public space, especially after noticing how people were reluctant to pick or eat fruit found this way. They were struck not only by how few people eat this fruit, but by how few people walk on neighborhood streets at all; Los Angeles is a city of cars. Much of their work around public fruit is around the issue of public and private property, and the question of what public space might be used for, i.e. the question of the commons. This expands into an investigation of public art by creating forms of art that might exist with and in the public that are not in the traditional forms of public art, such as a sculpture in a park. Among their work has been several public fruit proposals which aim to create large public spaces which serve much like traditional parks with the added bonus of growing only fruit trees which are tended and shared by the public, and also harvested to be shared by all. These may be seen as environmental sculpture or site-specific art.Fallen Fruit expanded upon this in 2013 with the opening of Del Aire Fruit Park, California's first public fruit park.
This was further expanded in 2014, with the start of Urban Fruit Trail, the pilot project for Endless Orchard, Fallen Fruit’s global-scale public art project, which will transform often under-served areas with a network of public walking trails lined by fruit trees. In total, 150 trees will be planted in the MacArthur Park/Westlake region of Los Angeles, in collaboration with Heart of Los Angeles, an urban youth outreach group. Once mature, the trees will bear gratis, year-round produce including plums, peaches, pomegranates, persimmons, lemons, limes, oranges and kumquats. 30 of the initial trees planted in Lafayette Park were destroyed by vandalism in July 2014, but they were quickly re-planted thanks to generous donations by the local community.
Exhibitions
Fallen Fruit garnered a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation in Charlotte, NC. They have had solo exhibitions at the Pacific Design Center Gallery , 21c Museum , Wexner Center for the Arts , Oficina Proyectos Culturales , Skirball Cultural Center , Portland Art Museum, Bemis Atlanta Contemporary, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art , as well as in group shows around the United States, Athens, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Mexico, Norway, Austria, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, Colombia, and the United Kingdom including a 2019 show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The group also collaborated with Islands of LA in the San Fernando Road Concert in 2008.Publications and Press
Fallen fruit has been featured in LA weekly's Best of LA Art 2019, 15 Los Angeles Artists to Watch, Artforum ; The New York Times; LA Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and LA Confidential.Their work has also been featured in such book publications as The Idea of the West by Doug Aitken, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and Design by Francesco Spampinato as well as numerous broadcast radio, TV, video and blog venues.