Page 21 - C.A.L.L. #41 - Summer 2016

Communal Living, the

21st-Century Way

Los Angeles artist Fritz Haeg is using his art to restore life to a long-abandoned Californian commune.

Tom Vanderbilt, March 10. New York Times.

TWO YEARS AGO, the Los Angeles artist Fritz Haeg, perhaps best known for his 2005 Edible
Estates project — which exhorted people to replace their front lawns with kitchen gardens — went looking
for land of his own. For the past decade, he’d been living on the road, doing urban art projects in an
itinerant way. Now, he felt the dialectical tug of the opposite: ‘‘A settled, rural situation, where I could live
full-time with a community of people.’’

He did not want raw land; rather, a place with ‘‘an interesting history.’’ A realtor called about a 35-acre
parcel in Mendocino County, and ‘‘as soon as I saw the pictures and read the description,’’ Haeg tells me,
‘‘it was like a revelation: This is it.’’ Salmon Creek Farm is a rugged, mostly sloping expanse shrouded in
second-growth redwood forest in the town of Albion; it was also a commune in the early ’70s. The
property was still owned by its original members, even though it had ceased being a functioning
community in the late 1980s. Haeg had come looking for land, and found a legacy instead.

The dining room at Dawn Cabin. Photo: Andres Gonzales.

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