Fallen Fruit is an ongoing art collaboration that began with creating maps of the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other cities. Their participatory projects have expanded to include Public Fruit Jams in which they invite citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours; Public Fruit Tree Adoptions that invite the public to plant trees on the margins of private property. Fallen Fruit’s visual images include an ongoing series of public art projects, museum installations and media works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. The artists of Fallen Fruit think of fruit as the lens by which they look at the world. More at www.fallenfruit.org or facebook.com/fallenfruit. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration originally conceived by David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young. Fallen Fruit uses fruit as a common denominator to change the way you see the world.

Ojai Mulberry Rye is the latest Neighborhood Infusions created by Fallen Fruit in collaboration with Ojai Beverage Company for OAF 2013. The Porch Gallery is the location for the public participatory performance hosted by David Burns and Austin Young of Fallen Fruit in which tastes of local mulberry infused rye are served to the public also with social prompts that question childhood memories and emotional connections to fruit. An ongoing project by Fallen Fruit in which local fruit is infused into a distilled spirit and name it for the surrounding neighborhood. One of the questions that interests us in thinking about local places is to determine what the essence of that neighborhood is, to think about its unique qualities connect community. The question Neighborhood Infusions asks is tinged with a bit of irony: can you capture the essence of a place in a bottle? It is served by docents (rather than bartenders) who take time to interpret the work for those interested in consuming it.

The "First Public Fruit Park In California" has already demonstrated that civic art can be a process of planning that creates an exception to civic policy. Its long-term success will facilitate the planting of other orchards in L.A.'s public spaces, and possibly in the many other cities where a wave of urban agriculture is drumming on the rocks of public policy. Might it also contribute to a change in State law? The Del Aire Fruit Park is more than just a policy-oriented "camel's nose" though, welcome and significant as that is. Instead, and in addition, by planting an orchard in public space and inviting us all to tend and gather what is growing, the Fruit Park proposes that Edenic abundance already exists; no plastic-wrapped redemption required. Watch new mini doc 'Thin End of the Wedge' by Janet Owen Driggs here: www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/del-aire-fruit-park.html