SAN FRANCISCO.- Artist and architect Fritz Haeg brings his project Animal Estates to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the program Live Art at SFMOMA. The site-specific project, which debuted at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, creates model dwellings for animals that have been displaced by humans. As animal habitats dwindle, Animal Estates proposes their reintroduction into our cities, strip malls, office parks, and front yards.

Model homes will be made for local animal “clients” during a series of weekly workshops open to the public. The workshops will feature presentations by local experts on each of the animal clients, plus animal-related sound, movement, writing, and garment-making activities.

Live Art at SFMOMA is an initiative to transform the nature of the museum’s live public programming to fully support the event-driven and performance-based nature of contemporary art.

Born in 1969 in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, Fritz Haeg is now a Los Angeles-based architect and artist. Haeg applies his skills to diverse artistic and curatorial practices that include designing houses, leading a peripatetic educational center, facilitating grassroots political activism, and experimenting in radical gardening. His project Edible Estates has helped lead a movement to create vegetable and fruit gardens on suburban front lawns. He has exhibited work at the Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.