2013 Artist-in-Residence: Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City
Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave
Minneapolis, MN 55403
T +1 612 375 7600
Home is the first place where most people can affect immediate change.
—Fritz Haeg
For the past decade Fritz Haeg has explored how we live in our cities, offering alternatives through edible gardens, domestic gatherings, public dances, animal architecture, temporary encampments, and educational environments. For his year-long Walker residency, At Home in the City, the artist has worked with Twin Cities residents and community groups on plantings, events, and a gallery installation. Three interrelated projects—Foraging Circle, a planting in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden; Edible Estate #15: Twin Cities, a suburban front lawn transformed into an edible organic garden; and Domestic Integrities A05, Haeg’s most recent body of work—encourage us to re-imagine our relationships to the land, the home, the city, and each other.
Domestic Integrities A05, the fifth American iteration of this traveling project on view through November 24, explores the ways we make use of local resources, bringing cultivated and wild landscapes into our homes. The centerpiece of the project is a large circular rug crocheted from discarded clothing and textiles. The rug was started in spring 2013 using antique linens from Mildred’s Lane, a farm in rural Pennsylvania, with sequential rings added from its time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Its outermost rings were made at the Walker Art Center by volunteers from around the Twin Cities. For Haeg, the rug is a charged site for testing and performing how we want to live with materials harvested and processed from the Foraging Circle, Edible Estate, and other local gardens and homes.
Foraging Circle is a newly commissioned work for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in association with the Garden’s 25th anniversary. Conceived by Haeg and established in May 2013, this communal garden features a wide diversity of plants, many native to the region, with domestic uses such as herbals, medicinals, edibles, and plants for dying textiles and attracting pollinators. Situated at the center of the grounds, a geodesic domes serves as a headquarters for public workshops, conversations, meals, and events related to local horticulture, food production, and urban farming. Periodically harvested for display on the Domestic Integrities rug inside, the garden will evolve throughout the seasons and remain an educational demonstration garden in future years.
Edible Estate #15: Twin Cities is the most recent in Haeg’s series of regional prototype gardens. Initiated in 2005 in Salina, Kansas, these plantings make food production publicly visible in unexpected urban places, most notably the ubiquitous front lawn. Haeg has planted fourteen Edible Estate gardens in cities as far-flung as Budapest and Baltimore, London and Lakewood, California. The Twin Cities plot marks the final chapter of the project, bringing it back to the American Midwest and the hometown of the artist. The Schoenherr household of Woodbury, Minnesota was chosen from an open call of more than 100 applicants across the Twin Cities metro area.
Closing weekend Rug Marathon
November 23 & 24, 11am–5pm
For the final weekend of the project, Haeg concludes his residency with a marathon series of conversations with local and visiting collaborators from past and present, including J. Morgan Puett of Mildred’s Lane and Gaetano Carboni of Pollinaria.
Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City is curated by Sarah Schultz and Eric Crosby with residency coordinator Anna Bierbrauer and program manager Ashley Duffalo.
Find the schedule of ongoing events online at walkerart.org/fritzhaeg.
Acknowledgements
Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City is made possible by generous support from the Bush Foundation. Foraging Circle was commissioned by the Walker Art Center in partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board.
Mack Lectures are made possible by generous support from Aaron and Carol Mack.
