Yard Art Gets A Closer Look at the ICA Philadelphia
September 26, 2024
“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.