- Artists

Austin Young (Tranimal, Fallen Fruit) is a multidisciplinary artist whose trademark style interprets a nuanced visual language of beauty, Pop culture, art history, folk art, and transgressive underground exuberance. Whether he’s working in a photography- and video-based modes of performative portraiture, engaging in assertive visibility for Queer culture, or advocating for a community-based resource sharing culture through the literal and metaphoric prism of public fruit trees, Young’s interest is in illustrating the sublime qualities of humanity that moves us all forward.
Originally from Reno, Nevada, studying at Parsons School in Paris, and currently living and working between Los Angeles and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from an early age, Young has invented novel ways of integrating his diverse interests and eclectic influences into a celebrated image-making career. Young’s practice grew from foundations in celebrity portraiture depicting figures from Margaret Cho to Debbie Harry, Diamanda Galas, Leigh Bowery, Jackie Beat, Alaska Thunderfuck, Siouxsie Sioux, and more in ways that confront personality and identity across gender roles and stereotypical societal constraints, to expansive practices in community engagement, books, performances, and urban agriculture.
Young’s infamous Tranimal Workshop series (with Squeaky Blonde and Fade-Dra) is an experience of radical metamorphosis, transforming willing victims in a gender-bending styling assembly line. “I’ve been doing portraits of drag queens, transsexuals and androgynes since 1985,” he says. “I’m drawn to the spaces in between what society expects and what’s real. What is gender? What is beauty? Who are we supposed to be and who are we in fact?”
Young is also a cofounder of Fallen Fruit, a contemporary art collective that uses fruit as a material for projects, investigating the hyper-qualities of collaboration, and in its own way is also about challenging dominant paradigms. Using art as their starting point, they take direct action investigating cultural, economic, and ethnic oppression surrounding public and private fruit-bearing agriculture as a function of resources and colonial history. In addition to photography, video, cartography, tree adoption, and raucous jam-making parties, public fruit parks from Del Aire to Downtown LA, and decorative-arts juggernauts from Palermo to London—their includes public art projects, site specific commissions, and installations at museums, churches, gardens, palaces, and bespoke gathering places around the globe.
Whether creating flamboyant and gleeful transgressive portraiture, or encouraging the proliferation of public access to fruit trees, in a way, all of Austin’s work is about finding beauty and taking pleasure along the margins—and thereby bringing the margins closer to the center.