Bird Baths And Bottle Trees, Donald Judd And Jeff Koons

Conventional art history proclaims Abstract Expressionism as the first originally “American” artform. With all due respect to Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the de Koonings, another novel artform was simultaneously developing in post-War America.

It came from Wisconsin and Mississippi and Texas, outside “The City” whose critics, curators and collectors decreed what had worth and what did not. Emerging from the hinterland, this creative expression did not pass their muster. Neither did its practitioners. These artists didn’t attend the Arts Students League. They often didn’t attend any art college, or any college, or sometimes any high school for that matter.

Yard art.

Thousands of extraordinary ordinary citizens from coast to coast with an urge to create, producing an endlessly variable assortment of objects–artworks–and displaying them in their yards. Their side yards. Their back yards. Their front yards, where an increasingly mobile nation with more and more cars and more and more roads cruised past more and more houses, every now and then, one of them with homemade artwork installed outside.

Yard art receives a measure of its due at the Institute for Contemporary Art Philadelphia through December 1, 2024, with “Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard,” an exhibition countering the assumption that artistic production is bound to the studio, gallery, or museum. For curator Josh T Franco, the show’s title is autobiographical.

“My grandfather’s evolving, elaborate environments were my earliest training grounds as an artist and art historian—and it’s where my passion for close looking and for the artistic process began,” Franco explained when announcing the exhibition. “From my own backyard to the barrio to the reservation and beyond, this field of everyday artmaking that is evidenced in yard art demonstrates a persistent world-building impulse across diverse spaces, makers, and audiences.”

Their connection was creativity and country. While folk art and self-taught artists and outsider art and Indigenous art is commonplace the world over, yard art is originally American because yards are originally American.

Yards and lawns and their rapid adoption and expansion across the nation were a post-War phenomenon. More homes were built. More fences went up. More yards were created.

America’s population at this time was also incredibly handy. Most people made things or fixed things for a living. Boilers. Machines. Engines. Shoes. The economy was industrial, not service or tech based.

Americans also had access to a great volume of stuff. Concrete chunks. Scrap metal. Tin cans and glass bottles. Old gears. Wood of every shape, form, and fashion.

Give crafty people all kinds of raw materials and space to work with and the creatives among them will make art. Like Franco’s grandfather who was always making things–what Franco would later come to understand as sculpture–salvaging playground equipment and applying his creativity to disassembling it and reassembling it into something artistic.

Bird Baths and Bottle Trees

Yard art was never a cohesive or formal movement, there was never a “manifesto” of goals, but it existed as surely as AbEx and continues to today.

Not surprisingly, the production was never favored by critics. In researching the show, Franco came across a Harper’s Bazaar issue from mid-century where the magazine’s chief editor, an art historian, produced a diagram trying to define high and low taste in America; yard art was squarely in the low, represented by a bird bath. Yard art was codified as low culture from its origin.

Franco blows that bias up in “Art from the Yard” which features an artist list including David C. Driskell, Donald Judd, Noah Purifoy, Wendy Red Star, Jeff Koons, and vanessa german.

How are these modern and contemporary art stalwarts with artworks and exhibitions filling the world’s most prestigious museums yard artists?

“The novel thing my show contributes to art history (is) there’s clearly a phenomenon where yard art has become a lexicon that’s separate from the yard space itself,” Franco told Forbes.com.

Yard art isn’t restricted to yards.

“I wanted to show how yard art is not bound to yards, but is a language that contemporary art has appropriated in a lot of amazing ways,” Franco said. “Koons making the bird bath is a perfect example of that, that (object) has obviously never lived in a yard and I’m sure never will, but it’s definitely in the language of the yard.”

Take that Harper’s Bazaar and your snotty attitude toward bird baths.

Josh T Franco is from Odessa, TX, but his grandfather grew up in the small town of Marfa where Donald Judd set up a robust artistic outpost in the middle of nowhere. Franco still has relatives there and worked for the Judd Foundation in New York.

Visitors are invited to take a seat on Judd’s Wintergarden bench while admiring a windmill made by Franco’s grandfather, not far from Koons’ Gazing Ball (Birdbath).

“The Wintergarden bench being in the show was to demonstrate that yards are leveling, and they’re places where you have to respond to necessity. Judd living in west Texas, he made a funny comment somewhere like, the only furniture that was available for sale was the old, heavy, wood, dark furniture that he would never put in his spaces,” Franco explained. “(Judd) got into furniture because he moved to west Texas and had to make it himself. The Wintergarden bench was made specifically for an outdoor space, the winter garden. The original design was motivated by necessity, needing outdoor furniture.”

In over 30 works ranging across media and geographies, the exhibition presents artists from the past five decades whose practices deploy utilitarian and elaborate aesthetics, found and handmade materials, and references to the sacred, the familial, and popular culture.

Three monumental sculptures incorporating bottles by vanessa german reference bottle trees, an icon of yard art. Works by the Indigenous, all-women and non-binary collective BUSH raise the question of how the reservation shifts yard art discourse. As do Wendy Red Star’s Rez Cars photographs.

Admission to ICA Philadelphia is free.

The Persistence of Yard Art

With most Americans now living is cities, and suburbanites’ creativity in their yards restricted by fascist homeowners associations demanding a dead, boring, uniform aesthetic, are the days of yard art over? Not according to Franco.

“You just have to leave the city, but even in cities–I used to live in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, that’s a strong Polish community, or at least was, there’s a lot of Catholic Polish folks, a lot of altars in yards that were decorated, sometimes very beautifully, sometimes very simply, but it’s everywhere,” he said.

Eastern Europeans in the Midwest and Northeast, African Americans in the rural South, ranchers out west, they have always formed the backbone of yard art. Self-sufficient people, creative people whose outlet for that creativity didn’t–often couldn’t–fit the traditions of a studio or gallery.

They’re still around if you know where to look.

The Kohler Foundation’s SPACES Archives is an excellent resource for documenting and finding yard art destinations on your next road trip. The Wisconsin-based arts organization exists to preserve and promote artist built environments and yard art installations.

The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore takes yard art as an emphasis. You’ll find it at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.

Pay attention, you might even come across some in your neighborhood, perhaps your own yard.