Plants, Life, Riverside is an interpretive project about plants in an urban setting. Today we learn how fruit and participatory art connects communities.
Fallen Fruit is an art collaborative founded ten years ago by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work. Fallen Fruit uses fruit as a common denominator to change the way people see their world. David and Austin explain:
“Fallen Fruit began in Los Angeles in 2004 with mapping ‘public fruit’ – fruit that grows on or over public property. Our projects include diverse site-specific artworks that embrace public participation. Fallen Fruit’s art works invite people to experience their city as a fruitful, generous place, inviting people to engage in sharing and to collectively explore the meaning of community and collaboration through temporary communities and exhibition programs. Our work focuses on urban space, neighborhood, located citizenship and community in relation to fruit.”
Fallen Fruit has held events and exhibitions in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Spain, Colombia, Australia and Greece. This weekend Fallen Fruit will host an event in Riverside, CA. On Saturday October 18, they will bring their Lemonade Stand to Cesar Chavez Community Center as a participant of Riverside Art Make, a community-focused campaign to bring the arts into Riverside’s 26 neighborhoods. Riverside Art Make is organized by the Riverside Art Museum.
Fallen Fruit’s lemonade stand is not your typical lemonade stand. Visitors to the pop-up beverage counter receive real lemons and are instructed to draw a self-portrait on their lemon. In exchange for their self-portrait, Fallen Fruit gives visitors a glass of organic lemonade. David and Austin explain that “the lemon self-portraits create a new form of public that illustrate some of the archetypes that construct community.”
David and Austin’s lemonade stand differs from traditional lemonade stands in yet another way. Their lemonade stand comes with a microphone set up for real-time storytelling. Visitors will be invited to use the microphone to respond to prompts selected by Fallen Fruit.
You are invited to take part in Riverside Art Make on Saturday, October 18, 2014. The lemonade stand will be open 11 am – 2 pm.
The Cesar Chavez Community Center is located at 2060 University Avenue, Riverside, CA (map).
This weekend’s Art Make event will be held in collaboration with the City of Riverside’s Neighbor Fest celebration in Bobby Bonds Park.
Watch Video About Fallen Fruit
About David Burns
David Burns is a life-long Californian and native of Los Angeles. He earned an MFA in Studio Art from UC Irvine and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts. David is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for creating art projects that investigate the boundaries of public spaces, including urban geographies, historical archives and time-based media. Prior to his work with Fallen Fruit, David was core faculty in two programs at CalArts from 1994 to 2008. David’s curatorial practice investigates narrative structures in contemporary art with notable exhibitions for the journal Leonardo at MIT; the Armory Center for the Arts and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Currently, David is faculty in the Social Practice graduate program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Concurrent to the development of his career in contemporary art and academics, David has also built expertise in corporate branding strategy, advertising and television as a technical consultant for projects with Mercedes Benz, Discovery Channel, SEGA Gameworks and others. David’s work activates the nuances of social spaces, public archives and cultural indexes as an authentic negotiation by creating works of art that are expressions of people and place and reframe the real-world and the real-time.
About Austin Young
Austin Young grew up in Reno, Nevada. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles and studied painting at Parsons in Paris, France. Early in his career, Austin transferred his interests from traditional painting and taught himself portrait photography. In many ways, Austin is more accurately described as an image-maker: his works illustrate the sublime qualities of character that make celebrated people unique. Based on a visual language of iconography, his trademark style and techniques have captured musicians, artists and celebrities including Debbie Harry, Leigh Bowery and Margaret Cho. In several series, Austin captures portraits of drag and transgendered subjects, confusing personality and identity issues in confrontational and unapologetic images of people who do not cross gender but instead split gender and socially-constructed identity. Recently, Austin’s portraiture practice has become a reality TV subject, with Austin featured as a recurring character on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Gene Simmons Family Jewels. Austin directed and produced a feature length documentary, Hadda Brooks, This is My Life, about torch singer Hadda Brooks, and has completed production on his second feature film, a crowd-sourced musical titled TBD, a musical play and video by EVERYONE who comes. Austin is a co-founder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for projects that investigate the synergistic qualities of collaboration. Fallen Fruit performs works of art that are transgressive about authorship and prescribed meaning.
Related Interests
Fruitarians, Hunters, Politics & You
Many thanks to David Allen Burns for his help with this article.
ArtPlantae Today 