Tuesday, October 7, 2014
The Coleman Center for the Arts (CCA) was pleased to host a “Public Fruit Jam” with artists David Burns and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit as a part of their ongoing collaboration with the CCA and surrounding community. The event took place at the Public Picnic Tables created by Fallen Fruit with the CCA in 2012. The tables, made by local craftsman Denis Sturdivant, are inscribed with quotes from area residents about their childhood memories of fruit.
The Public Fruit Jam is an ongoing collaborative performance that Fallen Fruit has been realizing with communities and organizations around the country since 2006. The artists invite the public to bring homegrown or street picked food and collaborate with fellow participants to create jam, fashioning flavors out of the spontaneous combinations of participants. Flavors made at the CCA included mixed berry, kiwi berry, plum, tomatillo-jalapeño and pear. After working together to prepare fruit, groups of three and four combined their fruit with pectin, sugar and water, and waited for the jam to cook.
While enjoying a meal of mac’ n’ cheese, collard greens and cornbread prepared by Larkin’s Restaurant and Deli, the group discussed future plans. In the artists inaugural conversation with the community in 2012, residents shared memories of York as place of pastoral abundance. In the words of one resident, “You could find them everywhere. People would just throw out seeds. You could just go around town and watermelons would be growing on the road.”
Fallen Fruit now wants to work with area residents to re-plant the organic free watermelons of York’s past. “Mother Patch” will be a central public seeded watermelon patch that will become the new epicenter for the germination of watermelon throughout York. A public campaign will call the citizens of Sumter County to “Spit Your Seeds” so that feral, organic, free watermelons will once again grace the margins of sidewalks, highways and footpaths.
Engaging in the CCA’s collaborative method of project development, residents shared their thoughts and feelings about future directions. The group discussed overall impressions, watermelon stories and hopes for the new public watermelon patch. Ideas for a harvest celebration included three legged races, a seed spitting contest, watermelon canning and more. Participants also discussed the use of watermelons in contemporary and historical instances of racial and geographic stereotyping. The group concurred that the joy, sweetness and universality of watermelons supersede these negative and erroneous images. In “Mother Patch” watermelons will be used to transform existing natural resources of abundance—sunshine, earth and water—into a public source of abundance.
The evening ended with tasting fresh jam on home baked bread from the nearby Mennonite bakery, under the cypress trees by candlelight. Participants took home their jam, trading favorite flavors with their new friends. A good time was had by all.
Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived in 2004 by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Since 2013, David and Austin have continued the collaborative work.
This event is made possible by funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Daniel Foundation of Alabama and the generous contributions of our individual sponsors. For more information please contact the Coleman Center for the Arts at 205.392.2005.
Using fruit as a lens the Fallen Fruit investigate urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. The collective aims to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of and in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. For more information visit www.fallenfruit.org.