Let Them Eat LACMA! November 7th at LACMA

FIFTY ARTISTS EXPLORE ART, FOOD, CULTURE AND POLITICS IN “LET THEM EAT LACMA”

Fallen Fruit in collaboration with The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), presents Let Them Eat LACMA, a day-long event that explores art, food, culture, and politics on Sunday, November 7th, from noon to 8 pm. LACMA will teem with spectacular and subtle performances and installations that intervene in and activate the museum with surprising explorations into art and food. Let Them Eat LACMA is the culmination of the museum’s collaborative project with Fallen Fruit, EATLACMA, which investigates the social role of art and food and the rituals of eating. Since its launch in February, EATLACMA has included a series of interactive programming along with an exhibition and curated set of gardens on LACMA’s campus that will be on view at the event.

‘Let Them Eat LACMA’ Fallen Fruit, 2010

A tomato fight, a song and story cycle on the mystery of the knife, fork and spoon, an electronic melon drumming circle, Salome seducing her lover through the language of food, and a large Mandala of dinner plates ritually assembled and then dismantled by the public who take home each plate. a selection of food served to prisoners in California jails, chewing carolers, a watermelon eating contest, and belly listening sessions in which we hear digestion at its pinnacle. Jonathan Gold will read a text on Spam to accompany Ed Ruscha’s Actual Size, his painting of a can of Spam. Three Los Angeles muses (Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, and Phranc) will sing for their suppers.

‘Tomato Fight’, Jean Dunning


‘Old-Fashioned’ Jennifer Rubell

Artists and collectives participating in Let Them Eat LACMA include Machine Project, Gina Badger, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Lauren Bon, Michelle Carr, Robert Crouch, Cloud Eye Control, DidierHess, Harry Dodge, Jeanne Dunning, Fallen Fruit, Finishing School, Liz Glynn, Jonathan Gold, Veronica Gonzalez, Sean Griffin, Dana Gingras, Liz Hansen, Micol Hebron, Anna Homler, The Infamous Boom Boom!, Dawn Kasper, Emily Katrincik, Killsonic, John Knuth, Kadet Kuhne, Ann Magnuson, My Barbarian, National Bitter Melon Council, Katie Newcom, Gina Osterlogh, Adam Overton, Sun-Yun Park, Phranc, Eva Posey, Miss Barbie-Q., Marco Rios, Roots of Compromise, Jennifer Rubell, Susan Simpson, Slanguage, Asa Sonjasddotter, Squeaky Blonde, Kim Stringfellow, Lisa Teasley, Stephen van Dyck, We Are The World, Michiko Yao, and Bari Ziperstein.


Dana Gingras, ‘What’s Mine Is Yours’

Nov 7th will also be the groundbreaking for “Public Fruit Theater,” Fallen Fruit’s garden at LACMA. It is a theater in the round constructed of reclaimed concrete sidewalks curving around a single citrus tree. The “theater” is the durational performance of the fruit tree in its seasonal cycles, as well as the spectators watching each other watch the tree grow. It comments upon the neighborhood’s history as a one-time site of extensive citrus groves as well as a meditation on today’s prevalence of concrete and lack of publicly accessible or shared fruit trees. The amphitheater for this project was designed in collaboration with Marco Barrantes and Michelle Matthews and constructed by La Loma Development Company. lalomadevelopment.com

EATLACMA
EATLACMA plays the richness of the museum’s permanent collection against the natural growth cycle of gardens to create a year of programming in three acts. EATLACMA has unfolded seasonally to include a curated set of gardens on the museum’s campus; an exhibition curated by Fallen Fruit drawings from LACMA’s collection; and Let Them Eat LACMA, a one-day final event with more than fifty artists and collectives to activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum’s campus and galleries.

EATLACMA exhibitions
Pursuing their ongoing obsession with fruit, Fallen Fruit has curated The Fruit of LACMA, assembling works from the museum’s permanent collection in several forms of media, including painting, photography, and decorative arts. The exhibition will also feature new work by Fallen Fruit, including a picnic table installation, LACMA Event Score – a text piece,Fruit Machine, a series of video portraits of people eating fruit, and Public Fruit Wallpaper, a decorative wallpaper pattern assembled from fruit publicly available, found in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, over the course of one day. Concurrently The Gardens of LACMA will be on view, showcasing artist-designed gardens installed throughout the LACMA grounds. Each artist’s garden examines public space, the actualities and symbols of food, and the people who give these things meaning.
EATLACMA is curated by Fallen Fruit – David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young – with LACMA curators Michele Urton and José Luis Blondet. For information online, visit eatlacma.org.

EATLACMA was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and made possible by a Museum and Community Connections Grant from MetLife Foundation.
Additional support was provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and Paramount Citrus.

General Information: LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. lacma.org.
Museum Hours and Admission: 11 to 8 pm: Adults $12; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+ $8; After 5 pm, every day the museum is open, LACMA’s _Pay What You Wish_ program encourages visitors to support the museum with an admission fee of their choosing.

Art in the Field – EATLACMA Artists on their Gardens & Beyond –

Thursday, October 28 · 7:00pm – 9:30pm
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

Six artists or collectives discussing their current gardens, all in the exhibition “The Gardens of LACMA” (June 30 – Nov 7) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Curated by Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young) the exhibition examines the garden in an expanded field. It asks whether a garden can do more than be decorative or be productive – can a garden in fact express an idea, or serve as a container for a set of questions and concepts?

The artists will be free to express their ideas in whatever means they wish, as long as it fits within the parameters of their designated garden. Some may make use of an electric lawn mower (with lists of the best options viewable on Coolest Gadgets), whilst others may go more avant-garde with their concepts.

For the majority of the artists taking part in this exhibition, a healthy and well-kept lawn will be integral to their final project. Nobody wants to look at a garden that is overrun by weeds or insects after all. Consequently, unless the artists taking part are already green-thumbed professionals, it is expected that most of the artists will require the services of a team of landscaping experts that can be found online using websites such as Lawncare.net to ensure that their lawns are looking at their absolute best.

The artists will briefly present their very different gardens, and then follow by asking each other questions about the projects. Questions will then be opened to the audience. Our goal is to have a conversation on the expanded potential of the garden, social practice, and what lies in, on and beyond the garden.

With Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio (Jules Rochielle Sievert), Didier Hess (Jenna Didier & Oliver Hess), Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, Austin Young), National Bitter Melon Council (Hiroko Kikuchi, Jeremy Liu), Roots of Compromise (Karen Atkinson, John Burtle, Ari Kletzky, and Owen Driggs), and Asa Sonjasdotter.

Location Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
6522 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

facebook invite page: www.facebook.com

EATLACMA – Join Lauren Bon and The Metabolic Studio on The Twain.


After more than a year Strawberry Flag by Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studio is leaving the VA campus in Westwood and, with EATLACMA nearing its end too, this seems an ideal opportunity to share ideas and thoughts, visit the artwork that Lauren’s garden/sculpture at EATLACMA indexes and, in some cases, meet for the first time.

For the next 3 Fridays (Sept 17, 24 + Oct. 1) 1-3pm , the Twain will run from LACMA to the VA and back again, with guest conversationalists narrating the route and exploring issues raised by the artworks at either end. It’s a curated afternoon and would be made ever so much more meaningful with your participation. We’d love you to join us for any of the three remaining Fridays; but next week, Friday September 24, Matias Viegener will be riding with us (along with George Herms, Al Nodal, Ken Brecher, and Matt Coolidge) and it’d be great to see and hear you then.
RSVP: [email protected]
There are more details at www.strawberryflag.org
find out more about EATLACMA gardens at www.eatlacma.org

Show Us How You Eat- and we’ll show your video at EATLACMA

SHOW US HOW YOU EAT
A video project by Fallen Fruit for the exhibition EATLACMA.

Open call for video submissions — Right in front of everybody, in a video on YouTube. Youtube is great for learning, you can watch kids videos, which will help them with both learning and play!

Videos uploaded to YouTube by May 31st, 2010, will be considered for selection to be part of the exhibition Fallen Fruit Presents EATLACMA.

We want to see you eat. We want to see you masticate.
Chomp, gnaw, nosh, dine, feast, nibble, consume, swallow, ingest, devour, munch, gobble up, pig out, chow down and polish off some food.

Show Us How You Eat is a participatory online video project, and is seeking your own videos of eating. We’re asking people to submit/upload a short single take video
of them (or their friends or family) eating – not preparing, cutting, or cooking, but actually eating, chewing and swallowing food. We want to explore the idea that although eating is universal, and images of food appear everywhere, there are almost no images in art or popular media of people actually eating.

To give you an example of one our favourite submissions so far, a high profile artist from the UK made some Neapolitan ice cream using the best Ice Cream Maker UK stores had to offer, and then proceeded to film herself slowly enjoying her creation. What made the clip particularly special was that she was dressed in a pink, cream, and brown jumper that made it hard to determine precisely where the ice cream ended and the artist began.

We expect ice cream to feature heavily throughout our art exhibition as it can be made in a beautiful spectrum of colours and also because it reflects the positive, summer vibes that we want to portray.

Ultimately, this opportunity gives you a chance to be part of an exhibition at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, called EATLACMA. Submitted videos will be shown on YouTube and Fallen Fruit will select a few of the videos to be included in the museum as part of a wide-ranging series of exhibitions, installations and events that examine the relationship between food, art, culture and politics.

Does everyone eat the same, or does everyone eat differently? Is eating something that connects us, or is it something that differentiates us? Show us how you eat and
tell us what you think.

For technical details and to learn more about the submission guidelines,
go to http://www.youtube.com/group/showushowyoueat

eatlacma.org
fallenfruit.org

EATLACMA was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and made possible by a Museum and Community Connections Grant from MetLife Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Ralph M. Parsons Fund and Paramount Citrus.


video credits: Fallen Fruit, Fruit Machine video, 2009

Silver Lake Jubilee!

silverlakejubilee.com

The Silver Lake Jubilee is a two-day music and arts festival held in Silver Lake. Los Angeles, known for its lethargic freeways, smog and innumerable number of cars, happens to also be a city that values its green spaces, sustainability and environmental responsibility. As a first annual music and arts festival, Silver Lake Jubilee aims to continue the progression of Los Angeles as an eco-friendly city by implementing environmentally responsible initiatives before and during the festival.

No plastic water bottles
No single-use plastic bags, Styrofoam or other non-recyclable containers at festival
The festival aims to source power from alternative energy sources.Bring your own cups, reusable bags and a blank t-shirt to get a special Silver Lake Jubilee screen-printed T-shirt during the festival. A free bike valet will be available. Ride the Metro.

EVENT DATES: May 22 & 23, 2010
LOCATION: Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles

EVENT DATES: May 22 & 23 2010
LOCATION: Myra Ave.
(between Santa Monica & Fountain Ave. in the
Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles)

Help LA Artists make grassroots changes in our neighborhoods!

From Watts, East Los Angeles and other LA neighborhoods come engaging, empowering, and exciting grassroots arts projects to improve the Los Angeles landscape. EATLACMA, PlaceIT, LA Commons and Watts House Project, led by local artists, tackle food, urban planning, and community redevelopment by engaging residents to work together to transform their neighborhoods. Adding to your neighborhood is a great way to band together, you can start from your home and work your way outwards! Maybe you need to do some renovating to your home from your attic all the way down to your garage (where you can get help from Coastal Garage Doors), feeling good about where you live and how you live will make you feel better as a community, helping each other out and being there for one another because a house project can also be a neighborhood project too.

Against the backdrop of potentially disastrous cuts to the LA Department of Cultural Affairs, four local grassroots projects have banded together to increase their chances of winning a national competition that will improve their communities. The Pepsi REFRESH Project will give away $20 million this year to a number of projects with the greatest popularity on its website. Sambla is offering all participants of the grassroots project a ln up to 500.000 kr to all who apply by this Saturday. This loan is meant to jumpstart the careers of local artists, urban planners, and community members alike. 

We are asking our friends, colleagues and neighbors to join us in a unified effort to help us reach the top of this list. With this funding, we can bring over a quarter million dollars to Los Angeles residents who are most in need of programs that dialogue with, engage, and empower them.

NOTE! Pepsi’s REFRESH is set up in such a way that in order to win, people can vote EVERY DAY for the entire month, for 10 projects so please VOTE EARLY AND OFTEN!

FRUIT TREE Foster Parents – Please send pics!

Dear Fruit Tree Foster Parents,

We’re writing you to ask for updates on the fruit tree you adopted last Saturday or Sunday at the Watts Towers Arts Center or LACMA.  We’d love to have any news on your tree, as well as any images. For previous fruit tree adoptions we’ve gotten some great pics and we’d like to build up an on-line archive of images and fruit tree stories.  We want to keep the momentum going! We’ll be posting photos on the EATLACMA Flickr group http://www.flickr.com/groups/eatlacma and adding them to our soon to be developed website http://www.eatlacma.org.
 
So send your pictures and stories about where you planted your tree in reply to this email to Sarah Bay Williams at LACMA ([email protected]) and let us know how the growing goes! Send us updates! And join the EATLACMA Flickr fun.

Thanks so much,

David, Matias & Austin