Green Right Now Blog

Shermakaye Bass
(Green Right Now) Austin, Texas, is known for its enthusiastic (some would say vehement) greenness, and these days, at least one arts organization is taking a strong eco-stance.

The Arthouse at the Jones Center is hosting "Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn," a multi-prong installation by the roving American artist/architect/green activist, which concludes with the planting of a community garden in Austin March 14-16.

A native of Minneapolis whose work made the cut for this year's Whitney Biennial (begins March 6 in New York), Haeg has a heady but nature-driven approach that hails from "the intersection of art and social activism," Arthouse says. His intention is to nurture collaborations between community organizations, art institutions, sustainable gardening advocates and the soil itself. And in the end, Haeg's ultimate goal is to show how we can supplant those lush, oh-so-American lawns with what he calls edible estates.

He will demonstrate this by using two different venues in Austin: a low-income non-profit housing project and the Arthouse, a hip exhibition space located a few blocks down from the Capitol on Congress Avenue.

The housing development, Sierra Ridge, will be the site of "Prototype Garden #5," as it's called. This is Haeg's latest garden-centric installation, and number five in his traveling "Edible Estates" series, which he began in 2005. Earlier plantation sites are in New Jersey, Kansas, California and London, England. When complete, the Edible Estates project will include nine garden sites in all.

Haeg's Austin show is unique in that it combines those elements of hands-on responsible gardening with more esoteric, or just plain visual, elements that communicate Haeg's overall vision.

Like other Edible Estates sites, Sierra Ridge's "Prototype #5″ will feature a vegetable garden, with focus on sustainable, local food production. Haeg and Arthouse curators hope to get the community involved in the two-day plantation, because even after Haeg's art show has concluded, Sierra Ridge will have its own garden.

Meanwhile, the LA-based artist, who's in his late 30s, has transformed Arthouse into what the center calls a "community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and, finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation" with photographs and video from the artist's previous works. Perhaps most intriguingly, it features "The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin," a concept with a real-time base at the Arthouse in a geodesic tent.

"How to Eat Austin" hosts a weekly series of free workshops pertaining to the cycle of food production, from composting to cooking to crop selection, garden design and marketing the garden's harvest.

The ongoing Sundown Schoolhouse project (which is directly related to Edible Estates series) is "a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts," according to Arthouse. It was founded on "the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a dialogue extending to the outside world and which values public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place."

The Edible Estates demonstration, in other words, has many facets, as Haeg explains: "It's a practical food producing initiative; a 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!"

It's fitting that Haeg began his Edible Estates series on Independence Day, 2005 — with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in Salina, Kansas, which the artist points out is the geographic center of the United States.

As Arthouse curator Sue Graze observes, "The thing I like the most about Fritz Haeg's artistic practice is its interdisciplinary nature. As an artist, Haeg works in the realms of fine art, aesthetics, architecture, landscape architecture, design, and social and cultural activism, among others. Because of the collaborative nature of his art, he engages audiences in new ways, outside traditional art venues."

MORE ABOUT FRITZ HAEG:

Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Schoolhouse, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and his role as an educator. He received his B.A. of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and has taught in architecture, design, and fine arts programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, among other institutions.

(Green Right Now)