CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/8/2013

Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City at Walker Art Center

How do we make ourselves at home in the city? What does it mean to grow and harvest our own food and resourcefully and artfully make ourselves at home? Edible Estates author Fritz Haeg, artist-in-residence at the Walker Art Center, explores these questions with his current exhibition/intervention, on view in Minneapolis through November 24.

Haeg’s practice spans a range of disciplines—architecture, performance, design, education, gardening, and ecology—and includes projects as varied as public dances, urban parades, temporary encampments, edible gardens, videos, and publications. He often creates environments that respond to particular places, working in collaboration with local residents and groups. Through a new series of projects, the artist will work with the Twin Cities community on gardens, events, and installations that collectively reimagine our everyday relationships to the land, the home, the city, and each other.

The residency launches in May 2013 with Edible Estate #15, the last edition of Haeg’s ongoing initiative to replace the suburban front lawn with highly visible productive gardens. Through an open call for participants to be held in late January 2013, one local household will be selected to work with the artist, neighbors, friends, and volunteers to transform their yard into an organic edible garden.

In the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, he will establish Foraging Circle (May–October 2013), a newly planted area of wild plants native to Minnesota. Situated at the center of this garden, one of Haeg’s geodesic dome structures will serve as a headquarters for public workshops, conversations, meals, and events related to local gardening, food production, and urban farming.

The project culminates with Domestic Integrities A05 (August 8–November 24, 2013), an exhibition in the Medtronic Gallery of new work that explores local patterns and rituals of domestic interior landscapes. This ongoing series examines ways in which gardens and landscapes are harvested and brought into the home. The centerpiece of the installation is a large crocheted rug nearly 30 feet in diameter, made by participants on-site. The space will host weekly rotations of what the artist refers to as “Domestic Integrities”—activities and items based on or made with materials gathered from their environment, from pickled vegetables and baked bread to herbal arrangements and homemade remedies.

Curators: Sarah Schultz and Eric Crosby