Yard Art Gets A Closer Look at the ICA Philadelphia

“Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard” is an act of devotion and confrontation in equal measure. The exhibition features more than 30 works by noted artists such as Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Noah Purifoy, and Wendy Red Star alongside community-taught artists such as the Bridge Way School Recovery Artist-in-Residence Program, Clarke Bedford, and the Painted Screen Society. The dynamic sightlines and interplay among works in the show, curated by artist and art historian Josh T. Franco as part of the ICA Philadelphia’s Sachs Guest Curator Program, offer an expansive framework for contemplating yard art.

Preparing La Virgen (December 3, 2023, Marfa, TX) (2023–24),a multimedia installation by Franco, orients the viewer to the dualities anchoring the show. The piece recreates a portion of a yard shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe that the Sanchez family created in Marfa, Texas, to commemorate what they said was the Virgin’s apparition in a tree trunk. Upon entering the gallery, one encounters repurposed tires and rocks holding candles and a concrete roadrunner by Hipolito “Polé” Hernandez, Franco’s grandfather, encircling a movie screen. The screen acts as a surrogate altar displaying footage of the Sanchez family shrine interspersed with text composed and compiled by Franco. In one still from the video, the Virgin contemplates a wholly different nearby shrine: a Donald Judd work. She observes that the pilgrims visiting this work “leave no ofrendas, no food, no little tin drawings. Not even a little pile of rocks. They do take: They take pictures.” Preparing La Virgen establishes the show’s recurring ley lines, naming the tensions between two juxtaposed practices that shaped Franco’s relationship to looking—Judd’s conceptual minimalism and the work of community-taught artists—but refuses their presumed irreconcilability.

Through overlaid text excerpted from Amalia Mesa-Bains’s essay “Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache,” Preparing La Virgen introduces viewers to the concepts of rasquachismo and domesticana, two sensibilities that reclaimed aesthetic strategies originating in working-class Mexican-American communities. Developed by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, rasquachismo embraces resourcefulness and inventiveness through an underdog perspective that challenges Eurocentric aesthetic hierarchies. Domesticana, which Mesa-Bains theorized in response to Ybarra-Frausto, examines the aesthetic practices Chicanas cultivated within the intimate space of the home, such as home altars and ofrendas. In “Where I Learned to Look,” these two sensibilities first appear within a culturally specific context, but throughout the exhibition, their relevance to a broader range of aesthetic practices quickly becomes apparent.

A trio of works by Bedford, Red Star, and Rubén Ortiz Torres examine the car’s location within yard art. Bedford’s Art Car (Volkswagen) (2016) is intricately ornamented with spirelike forms made from found objects. Nearby, three photographs on fabric from Red Star’s “Rez Pop” series depict broken-down cars seen in front yards throughout the Crow Indian reservation in southern Montana, while Ortiz Torres’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (2002), a stylized music video of riding lawnmowers customized to resemble lowrider cars, plays on a loop. The triangulation of these Bedford, Red Star, and Ortiz Torres works brings into focus how care, labor, and neglect converge upon the body of a car and on the stage of the yard. Similarly, when considered through the lens of rasquachismo, this grouping yields something unexpected: While Ortiz Torres’s video appears to be rasquachismo’s most direct descendant, Red Star’s and Bedford’s pieces brush against the vantage point and processes inherent to this sensibility.

As a liminal art form, yard art touches the edges of public and vanguard art while residing within neither category. Because of this, yard art can easily be overlooked and its spectacular visual presence can be reduced to its surface. However, it is within such interstitial spaces that yard art can be an ever-mutable, ever-shifting form. Franco describes yard art as “the space between the home and the wider world. It also includes the spaces of display that separate the home and the wider world.” Throughout “Where I Learned to Look,” this space expands and contracts as it extends invitations and pushes against the dichotomy of public and private. An array of works by members of Baltimore’s Painted Screen Society demonstrate how the space between the home and the wider world persists in urban settings, as residents of row homes began painting the screens on their street-level windows during the early 20th century as a way to get fresh air while maintaining privacy.

The pull between yard art as invitation and as partition deepens in relation to works that reframe the notion of the yard in terms of survival against centuries of colonial and racial violence. Archival photographs of artist David Driskell tending his bottle trees—displayed near the cascading blue glass bottles and gilt forms in vanessa german’s assemblage nothing can separate you from the language you cry in (2021)—speak to the form as an enduring emblem of protection within Black communities. BUSH Gallery’s video Coney Island Baby (2017) reconceptualizes the yard in terms of a relationship to land that is unbounded and grounded in stewardship and kinship. Works by Allison Janae Hamilton evoke the tradition of yard signs in the South: The smudged, hand-painted lettering and haphazard tumble of X’s and T’s in Yard Sign VIII (Wicked Problem) (2018)evoke a spectral forewarning, whereas the arrangement of layered, gilded, and silvered palm fronds in Red Hills Yard Sign (2021) suggests a sense of adornment and sanctuary that carries through an accompanying triptych of photographic works.

Throughout “Where I Learned to Look,” charged pairings question aesthetic hierarchies. The gallery’s lighting creates serendipitous interplays among works: A shadow cast by Hipolito Hernandez’s windmill toward Donald Judd’s Winter Garden Bench 16 (1980) recalls the exhibition’s opening motif, inviting the viewer to tussle with it again. “The altarpiece has become a lens for viewing the whole show, and there are echoes between works that become lenses upon each other,” says Franco. “David Driskell’s bottle trees offer a lens on tending that is in conversation with the Sanchez family’s altar, and video works by BUSH Gallery and Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater address hunting as sustenance, which then brings the lens of sustenance to the other works in the show.”

At a time when conversations persist around what it means for Latinx art to gain greater recognition within mainstream cultural institutions, “Where I Learned to Look,” asserts that rasquachismo and domesticana bear a relevance to a broad range of aesthetic practices, yielding an expansive framework that comfortably holds minimalism and art cars alongside rock snakes and elaborate installations.