Artwork Detail

The Del Aire Fruit Park is a ground-breaking civic art commission of an urban orchard that will be sustained, nurtured and harvested by the public. Artist collective Fallen Fruit, through public engagement and a close collaboration with the Office of Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and the Department of Parks and Recreation, planted the Del Aire Fruit Park. It is the first of its kind in California. Fallen Fruit hosted a fruit tree adoption, a fruit jam-making event and a tree planting day at Del Aire Park to generate a sense of shared ownership and long-term stewardship of the civic art project among residents, local students and County staff. Over 200 people from throughout the area with ages ranging from five to 75 participated in the three events. The fruit park includes an orchard with 27 fruit trees, ranging from peach to plum, 8 native grapevines and edible herbs — all of which are harvested freely by the community.

Using fruit as their lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. They began with a mapping of the “public fruit” growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities and have grown to include video, photography, site-specific installations and participatory events in cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works re-imagine public interactions with the margins of urban space, systems of community and narrative real-time experience. Public Fruit Jams invites a broad public to transform homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making as experimentation in personal narrative and sublime collaboration; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours explores the boundaries of public and private space at the edge of darkness; Public Fruit Meditations renegotiates our relationship to ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation. Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects re-index the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject matter. Fallen Fruit is a collaboration of David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young. For more information, please visit www.fallenfruit.org.