Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn :: January 26 - March 16, 2008 :: Arthouse at the Jones Center, 700 Congress Ave., Austin, Texas :: In conjunction with The Sundown Schoolhouse: How to Eat Austin and Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5. This is the first major exhibition of Haeg’s work.

Fritz Haeg: Attack on the Front Lawn surveys recent ecological initiatives completed by the artist and architect known for his socially-responsive and community-oriented practice. Working at the intersection of art and social activism, Haeg engages audiences in collaborative encounters that often take place outside of the institutional confines of a museum or gallery. This exhibition brings together photographic and video documentation from Haeg’s ongoing Edible Estates project along with ephemeral items and site-specific elements created for Arthouse’s space that relate to gardening and sustainable food production in Austin. For the exhibition, Arthouse has been transformed into a community resource center, schoolhouse, working greenhouse, and finally, laboratory for artistic experimentation. This umbrella exhibition provides context for two related projects — the Sundown Schoolhouse and Edible Estates — that Haeg has developed for Austin.

The Sundown Schoolhouse is a non-traditional educational environment for design, literary, performing and visual arts. It was founded on the premise that artists, designers, performers and writers should be powerful and active agents in society, engaging in a dialogue extending to the outside world and which values public interaction, physical connectedness, and responsiveness to place. A large geodesic tent within Arthouse serves as the base site for How to Eat Austin, a weekly series of free workshops related to the cycle of food production, from composting and garden design to cooking and marketing the garden harvest.

Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #5 is an ongoing project to replace domestic front lawns with highly productive edible landscapes responsive to culture, climate, context and people. According to Haeg, Edible Estates is a “practical food producing initiative, place-responsive landscape design proposal, a scientific horticultural experiment, a conceptual land-art project, a defiant political statement, a community out-reach program and an act of radical gardening!” This project was initiated by Haeg on Independence Day, 2005, with the planting of the first regional prototype garden in Salina, Kansas (the geographic center of the United States). Regional Prototype Gardens have since been planted in California, New Jersey and London, England. Commissioned by Arthouse and with the help of community volunteers, Regional Prototype Garden #5 will be planted from March 14-16, 2008 and located at Sierra Ridge, a non-profit run low income housing community in Austin. Ultimately, regional prototype gardens will be established in nine cities.

Fritz Haeg works between his architecture and design practice Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Schoolhouse, the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates), and his role as an educator. He received his B.Arch from Carnegie Mellon University and has taught in architecture, design, and fine arts programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, among other institutions. His new series of projects called Animal Estates will debut at the Whitney Biennial in March 2008. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, is published by Metropolis Books and distributed by D.A.P.