The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of Sundown Salon #29: Dancing Convention, a photograph taken at a gathering hosted by Fritz Haeg. Haeg and his peers come together regularly on Sunday afternoons to discuss a topic of their choosing — anything from improvisational dance to extreme knitting — at his home and workspace inside a geodesic dome in the Los Angeles hills. The multidisciplinary artist/architect/activist has a new installation, Animal Estates 1.0: New York, New York, now on view at the Whitney Biennial 2008.

Born in 1969 in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, Haeg trained as an architect at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in Venice and at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University. In 1995, he established Fritz Haeg Studio in New York City before relocating to Los Angeles, where he casually began the Sundown Salons in 2001. These forums have since become fruitful arenas of dialogue between avant-garde artists and collectives such as My Barbarian, assume vivid astro focus, Yoshua Okon, and others.

In conjunction with these meetings, Haeg also runs a series of educational ecological workshops called the Sundown Schoolhouse, as well as Edible Estates, a campaign to encourage individuals and communities to grow their own food. As documented in the book Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, these gardens have sprung up in unexpected places from Salina, Kansas to Maplewood, New Jersey.

Haeg's work — an amalgam of Fluxus, land art, and eco-activism — is not for sale, but has been exhibited at London's Tate Modern, Arthouse in Austin, MASS MoCA, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. For this year's Whitney Biennial, Haeg designed a collection of habitats for animals indigenous to New York's Upper East Side, including a burrow for an opossum and an eagle's nest. Should the intended tenants move in, they would no longer wander the city bereft, but could enjoy homes that evoke the island in its pre-civilized, forested state. - Lauren McKee

Fritz Haeg
Sundown Salon #29: Dancing Convention, 2006
Performance
Los Angeles, July 9, 2006
Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
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