Makerspaces: Aotearoa New Zealand: Temple University Libraries’ Artist-in-Residence Series: Fallen Fruit’s Endless Orchard

Tuesday 15 November 2016

Temple University Libraries’ Artist-in-Residence Series: Fallen Fruit’s Endless Orchard

In this, the third and final guest blog in Nicole Restaino’s series on Temple University Libraries’ artist-in-residency program, we get an exciting sneak-peek at the cross-campus collaboration they have planned for the end of the year with the artist collective Fallen Fruit. Enjoy! ~Erinn
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by Nicole Restaino

As 2016 draws to a close, the team at Temple University Libraries is preparing for Fallen Fruit to arrive in the next few weeks, pulling together our goals of connecting the university and the greater community to public art, as well as several collaborative campus initiatives.

Fallen Fruit is an art collaborative founded on the west coast, and was originally launched by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work, which began by mapping public fruit trees throughout Los Angeles. To quote the artists, the practice has since expanded:

…to include serialized public projects and site-specific installations and happenings in various cities around the world. By always working with fruit as a material or media, the catalogue of projects and works reimagine 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 of ourselves through guided visualizations and dynamic group participation.

One of the collective’s most recent projects, the Endless Orchard, is the focus of their visit to Temple and Philadelphia.

The Endless Orchard project takes audience participation and engagement to the next level to create a living public artwork through fruit tree adoption and planting as the primary activity. This project has allowed Temple University Libraries to leverage community engagement through our artist in residence project like never before, integrating with another important campus initiative, “Seeing Stories: Visualizing Sustainable Citizenship.”

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Through the Endless Orchard, any Philadelphia resident will be able to adopt a fruit tree; we’ve made eighty trees in a variety of styles available! These trees will then be mapped into Fallen Fruit’s Endless Orchard. We are even planting three cherry trees (our colors are cherry and white) on Temple’s campus. While David and Austin’s visit was anchored by the tree adoption on Sunday, November 13, they will also give an artist’s talk, mingle with faculty during a special reception, and lead a workshop while in town.

Through the Endless Orchard, any Philadelphia resident will be able to adopt a fruit tree…these trees will then be mapped into Fallen Fruit’s Endless Orchard.

This will be the first Endless Orchard adoption in Philadelphia, and a wonderful way to close out a collaborative fall programming season, as it is co-produced with our university’s Office of Sustainability, Temple Contemporary (the gallery at our art school), faculty and grad students in our General Education program, various arts disciplines, and the College of Liberal Arts. These entities have come together to create the “Seeing Stories: Visualizing Sustainable Citizenship” initiative, which focuses on sustainable practices in the material fields of art, design, and activism. So far we’ve hosted talks on the sexual politics of meat, held an artist’s lecture with the renowned Mel Chin, and worked with photographer Rachel Sussman. Fallen Fruit’s visit closes out our fall with a project that ties together all the strands of our “Seeing Stories” project.

“Seeing Stories” will continue throughout the spring with new artist projects and continued campus collaborations. Visit http://ift.tt/1iYCJwq to find out more and see what we schedule through the end of the year. For more on Fallen Fruit, visit their site at fallenfruit.org.

Nicole Stengel Restaino is an art historian, arts administrator and public programming curator. She is currently the manager of public programming and communications at Temple University Libraries, setting strategy, content, and assessment plans for cultural programming and events, publications, and outreach. Nicole contributes to ProgrammingLibrarian.org on best programming practices and regularly presents at and attends arts administration and scholarly conferences.