Sachs Guest Curator Josh T. Franco is joined by renowned artist Jeff Koons and art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw to discuss the influence and importance of yard art in contemporary art. This conversation will delve into the intersection of artmaking and liminal spaces, examining how yards have long served as vibrant sites of creativity, community, and cultural expression.
The trio will explore how Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard brings this informal art movement into the gallery, challenging conventional boundaries and celebrating the diverse ways people across the U.S. and beyond have used their yards as canvases for artistic innovation.
Prior to the conversation, join us for a special performance of Scriptorium con safos: Yard by Josh T. Franco in the ICA gallery from 1-2 pm. The piece demonstrates Franco’s practice of making art history by hand and resonates with the themes of reclamation and personal expression inherent to the exhibition. A light reception will follow.
Registration
Register to attend this free event here | Click here to join via Zoom.
Live captioning and ASL interpretation will be provided for this program.
ICA is committed to creating a welcoming environment for all visitors. For more notes on accessibility including accessible parking nearby visit our Accessibility landing page. If you require any accessibility accommodations or have any questions about the program, please contact Brittany Clottey (bclottey@ica.upenn.edu).
About the guest speakers
Josh T. Franco (b. 1985) is an artist and art historian from West Texas. He received his BA in Art History from Southwestern University in 2006, his MA in Philosophy, Interpretation & Culture from Binghamton University in 2010, and his PhD in Art History from Binghamton University, in 2016. As both an artist and art historian, Franco aims to ensure that his scholarship is constantly informed by the processes of making and exhibiting work and vice versa. He transforms his art historical research into artworks by incorporating archival materials, references to annotations, and his findings into his sculptures, videos, and performance work. By having one practice inform the other, he insists that art historical scholarship is also made by hand. Franco is the 6th Sachs Guest Curator at ICA.
Jeff Koons is one of the most prominent artists working today. He is known for transforming everyday images and objects into works of art that engage the viewer. For over four decades, Koons has created works of art that explore themes of self-acceptance, empowerment, and transcendence. Jeff Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania in 1955. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976. Koons lives and works in New York City. Since his first solo exhibition in 1980, Koons’s work has been shown in major galleries and institutions throughout the world. Koons is widely known for his iconic sculptures Rabbit and Balloon Dog as well as the monumental floral sculpture Puppy. His work was the subject of a major exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (June 27 – October 19, 2014), which traveled to the Centre Pompidou Paris and the Guggenheim Bilbao. Recent exhibitions include Shine at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence; Jeff Koons: Lost in America at QM Gallery ALRIWAQ in Doha; and Jeff Koons: Apollo at the Slaughterhouse, a DESTE Foundation Project Space, in Hydra, Greece.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the American context. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, The Art of Remembering, Essays on African American Art and History, (Duke: 2024), Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006), Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015), and I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women, at the National Portrait Gallery
About the exhibition
Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard celebrates the foundational role of yards in shaping contemporary art in America. Building upon existing scholarship on Yard Art, artwork created to exist in the transitional space between the home and wider world, artist and art historian Josh T. Franco examines the lineage of this robust American art form which has historically existed outside of museum and gallery spaces. Featuring over 30 works, the exhibition spotlights both community and academically taught artists over the past five decades including David Driskell, vanessa german, Donald Judd, Noah Purifoy, and Finnegan Shannon, revealing connections across communities in creative world-building with what is available. This exhibition is part of ICA’s Sachs Guest Curator Program, which since 2007 has funded artists and interdisciplinary creatives to curate ambitious contemporary art presentations and actualize projects that leverage the space of resources of ICA to examine emerging and underrecognized creative practices.
Support
Programming at ICA is made possible in part by the Emily and Jerry Spiegel Fund to Support Contemporary Culture and Visual Arts and the Lise Spiegel Wilks and Jeffrey Wilks Family Foundation. Public and Student Engagement at ICA is supported by the Bernstein Public Engagement Fund, Suzanne Weiss Doft & Jacob W. Doft, Stacey & Robert Goergen Jr., Hilarie L. & Mitchell Morgan, the Nash Family Foundation, Joline & David Stemerman, and by Dana McDonald Strong & Mark W. Strong.
ICA gratefully acknowledges support from the Katherine (CW’69) and Keith L. Sachs (W’67) Guest CuratorProgram. Additional support has been provided by Linda & Jeffrey Chodorow, Arthur Cohen & Daryl Otte, B.Z. & Michael Schwartz, Patricia & Howard Silverstein, and The Study at University City.
