Fallen Fruit is a collaborative art project that began in Los Angeles with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property.   Fallen Fruit uses cartography and geography as an indexical platform to generate serialized and site-specific works of art that often embrace public participation.  The work of Fallen Fruit includes photographic portraits, experimental documentary videos, public art installations, and curatorial projects.  Using fruit as a method of reframing the familiar, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood, and new forms of citizenship.   From protests to proposals for new urban green space, Fallen Fruit’s work aims to reconfigure the relationship of sharing and explore understandings of public and private, as well as real world and real time.  We consider fruit to be many things; it’s a subject and object at the same time it is aesthetic.  Fruit often triggers a childhood memory;  it’s emotional and familiar.  Everyone is an expert on the flavor of a banana.  Much of this work is linked to ideas of place and family, and much of these works echo a sense of connectedness with something very primal – our capacity to share with others. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 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 you see the world.

At HOLA, the students are making a cardboard set of the neighborhood and exchanging stories. They are learning how Urban Fruit Trail will transform their neighborhood. This artwork will become the background for the upcoming puppet show and music video. Fallen Fruit and HOLA youth set-up a lemonade stand in MacArthur Park. The public was invited to participate and draw their self-portrait on a lemon. Following the drawing they took a photograph with their lemon and were interviewed. After the oral histories were recorded, the participants traded their lemon portrait in exchange for a refreshing glass of lemonade.  

Urban Fruit Trails is a collaboration between HOLA and Fallen Fruit (David Burns and Austin Young) to create the City’s very first Urban Fruit Trail: over 150 fruit trees planted in the MacArthur Park neighborhood. Urban Fruit Trails was conceived by Fallen Fruit and is supported by a grant awarded to HOLA by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Program, which supports fearless and innovative collaborations in the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg. (Learn more : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN0kOKlKiAY&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fholapublicartproject.tumblr.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fsafe.txmblr.com&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY)

Click to learn more about Fallen Fruit Residency: https://holapublicartproject.tumblr.com/page/12