Purchase the book, Attack on the Front Lawn: $28.60, includes tax and shipping
Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn
in conjunction with
The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin
and the
Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5
January 26 - March 16, 2008
Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5, after
Commissioned by Arthouse
photo: Fritz Haeg
see more garden photos here
Schoolhouse Workshops: How to Eat Austin
Saturdays, 3-5 pm, beginning January 26
Workshops are free, open to the public and held at Arthouse at the Jones Center.
Schoolhouse Workshops details:
View our video podcast of Fritz Haeg at the first How to Eat Austin Workshop, January 26, 2008.
(click to view video of Fritz's talk at Arthouse)
Edible Estate Regional Prototype Garden #5 Planting:
Located at Sierra Ridge Apartments, 201 West St. Elmo, Austin, TX
March 14-16, 2008
Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn surveys a number of ecological initiatives recently completed by the Los Angeles-based artist and architect known for his socially-responsive and community-oriented practice. Working at the intersection of art and social activism, Haeg engages audiences in collaborative conversations and encounters that often take place outside of the institutional confines of a museum or gallery. This exhibition brings together photographic and video documentation from Haeg’s ongoing Edible Estates project (see below) along with ephemeral items and site-specific elements created by the artist for Arthouse’s space that relate to gardening and sustainable food production in Austin. For the duration of the exhibition, Arthouse has transformed itself into a community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation. This umbrella exhibition provides context for two related projects—the Sundown Schoolhouse and Edible Estates—that Haeg has developed for Austin.
Sundown Schoolhouse YOUR DIRT workshop
The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin
Conceived and led by Haeg in Los Angeles, the Sundown Schoolhouse is a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts, all housed within a geodesic dome. It was founded on the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a rich and complex dialog that extends to the outside world. The Schoolhouse seeks to present an alternate model for educational and artistic practice, one in which public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place are valued above all else. Haeg has planned a mobile Schoolhouse specifically for Arthouse, with a curriculum centered on the garden as an inspiring model for balanced relationships among art, natural resources and human need. A large geodesic tent within the galleries serves as the base site for How to Eat Austin, a weekly series of free workshops related to the cycle of food production, from composting and garden design to cooking and marketing the garden harvest. The Schoolhouse is equipped with various instructional and informational materials that visitors can use on site or take home.
Edible Estate #5 Austin, commissioned by Arthouse
photo: Sunshine Mathon
Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5
Edible Estates is an ongoing project to replace domestic front lawns with highly productive edible landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people. According to Haeg, Edible Estates is a “practical food producing initiative, place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!” This modest gesture to reconcile issues of global food production and urbanized land use was initiated by Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in a suburban neighborhood in Salina, Kansas (the geographic center of the United States). Since then three additional prototype gardens have been created, in Lakewood, California; Maplewood, New Jersey; and London, England. Commissioned by Arthouse and with the help of community volunteers, Regional Prototype Garden #5 Located at Sierra Ridge Apartments, 201 West St. Elmo, Austin, TX, will be planted March 14-16, 2008. Ultimately, regional prototype gardens will be established in nine cities across the United States.
About Fritz Haeg
Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio (though his currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and his role as an educator. He studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B. Arch. He has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine arts programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. In 2006 he initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the alternative educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wattis Institute, San Francisco; the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Maastricht; and the MAK Center, Los Angeles, among other institutions. His new on-going series of projects called Animal Estates will debut at the Whitney Biennial in March 2008 with a commissioned installation in front of the museum. His first book, EdibleEstates: Attack on the Front Lawn, will be published by Metropolis Books and distributed by D.A.P. in February 2008.
Schoolhouse Workshops: How to Eat Austin details:
Workshops about local ecology, gardening and food-growing presented at Arthouse in Austin, Texas in conjunction with the planting of Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5.
All workshops held Saturdays from 3:00 - 5:00pm at Arthouse / 700 Congress, Austin, TX 78701
(512) 453-5312
Free and open to the public.
#1 / January 26th / YOUR YARD / public ideas for private land and full frontal gardening / with Fritz Haeg
#2 / February 2nd / YOUR DIRT / composting workshop / with George Altgelt, Geo Growers
#3 / February 9th / YOUR PLANTS / planting and growing food in Austin and central Texas workshop / with Patty Leander, volunteer, Travis County Master Gardeners
#4 / February 16th / YOUR LABOR / workshop on caring for an edible garden of fruit, vegetable and herb plants / with Sustainable Food Center Community and Youth Gardening program
#5 / February 23rd / YOUR CHILDREN / workshop on making gardens for children, schools and students / with Martha Cason, Garza Indepence High School
#6 / March 1st / YOUR FOOD / cooking workshop with homegrown produce / with Sustainable Food Center's The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre program
#7 / March 8th / YOUR MARKET / marketing opportunities for backyard gardeners / with Andrew Smiley, Sustainable Food Center
Exhibition Sponsor: Whole Foods Market
Additional support provided by: McDugald-Steele Austin; Gardens; Big Red Sun; Jill and Dennis McDaniel; Melba and Ted Whatley
Media Sponsor: Edible Austin
Arthouse at the Jones Center is funded and supported in part by the City of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and by a grant for the Texas Commission on the Arts and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes a great nation deserves great art.
