Posts Tagged ‘public art’
Yes, we have no bananas…
Back in 2004, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young coined the term ‘Public Fruit’ and began mapping fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles. Their collaboration has expanded to include serialized public art projects and site-specific installations and happenings in cities around the world– always working with fruit as a material or medium.
Fallen Fruit’s visual work includes an ongoing series of narrative photographs, wallpapers, everyday objects and video works that explore the social and political implications of our relationship to fruit and world around us. Recent curatorial projects reindex the social and historical complexities of museums and archives by re-installing permanent collections through syntactical relationships of fruit as subject.
See the world through the lens of fruit at Fallen Fuit. (And find your own palette at Falling Fruit‘s interactive map of urban fruit trees.)
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As we ask ourselves if we dare to eat a peach, we might recall that it was on this date in 1887 that the Horlick brothers first sold “malted milk” to the public. In 1873, James and William Horlick had formed a company to manufacture their own brand of infant food; ten years later, they earned a patent for a new formula enhanced with dried milk. The company originally marketed its new product as “Diastoid”; but, looking for a broader market, trademarked the name “malted milk” in 1887. Just after the turn of the century, Horlick’s malted became popular as a provision for North and South Pole expeditions by Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, Ejnar Mikkelsen, Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, and Robert Falcon Scott– and profited mightily from the attendant publicity. Still, competition (Ovaltine, et al.) flooded into the market; eventually Horlick’s sold out to Beecham (now part of GlaxoSmithKline).
Polar explorer Ernest deKoven Leffingwell posing with crates of Horlick’s Malted Milk
Columbus sailed the prairie green…
Today is Columbus Day in the United States, the day that we celebrate Columbus, Indiana.*
Among its many other virtues, Columbus– a town of just under 40,000– ranks 6th in the nation for architectural innovation and design (as assessed by the American Institute of Architects) on a list that includes the likes of Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
Smithsonian Magazine has called Columbus a “veritable museum of modern architecture.” Visitors to Columbus can see more than 70 buildings and pieces of public art by internationally noted architects and artists, including I.M. Pei, Eliel Saarinen, Eero Saarinen, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, Dale Chihuly and Henry Moore. For example,
* The day once commemorated a Renaissance representative of Spain, who mistook the Caribbean Islands for the South China Sea (to wit, the name “West Indies”); on consideration of his crimes and misdemeanors (see almanac entry here), it was decided to shift the celebratory focus to the rather-less-mitigatedly delightful gem of Indiana.
As we book our visits, we might recall that, on this date in 1609, Thomas Ravenscroft, still a teenager at the time, published Deuteromelia or The Seconde part of Musicks melodie — which included the words to “Three Blind Mice” (to be set to a traditional tune), probably the first song lyrics to be published in English. Ravenscroft was the editor of the book, and the likely author of the rhyme.
Three Blinde Mice,
Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian,
Dame Iulian,
the Miller and his merry olde Wife,
shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife
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