EATLACMA Debuts This Weekend: A Year-long Project From LACMA and Fallen Fruit

EATLACMA is neither Joachim Splichal's latest museum café nor an art house monster movie, but a year-long project investigating the social role of food and art and the rituals of eating. The project is a collaboration between the LA County Museum of Art and Fallen Fruit, the LA-based artist collective, and will feature a year's worth of events, exhibits, talks and performances. The project kicks off this weekend with public fruit tree adoptions held at LACMA's campus this Saturday, and the Watts Towers Arts Center and Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center this Sunday. Fallen Fruit will hand out 150 trees at each site as a way of introducing the project and marking the beginning of the season's growth cycle.

And this? This is Elysian Park, a composited digital photograph which appropriates a war photograph and shows the three founders of Fallen Fruit as they explore "the possibility of finding liberty through public fruit." In other words, Make Jam, Not War.

Fallen Fruit

Elysian Park

As the year and the project progress, there will be exhibitions opening to the public in June, The Fruit of LACMA and The Gardens of LACMA, which assemble works from the museum's permanent collection and artist-designed gardens installed throughout the museum's grounds. There will also be artist-led garden tours, workshops, and a public fruit jam. The project culiminates in November with a day-long event.

EATLACMA is curated by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit, and LACMA assitant curator of contemporary art Michele Urton.