AT THE DEAD end of a quiet residential street in Birmingham, Ala., is a half-acre lot filled with rusted metal beams, two-by-fours and old crutches jutting into the sky. At first glance, the artist Joe Minter’s “African Village in America,” situated on the lawn of his home, next to the historically Black cemetery where his father, wife and two sons are buried, looks like little more than an affectionately tended junkyard, the kind of neighborhood eyesore people are generally programmed to walk past. But inside is one of the more intriguing public art installations in the country. Discarded dolls, car parts and other found objects are grouped together by shape and color. As one gazes at the collection, forms emerge — steel bodies, cinder-block towers, outlines of rooms. Closer inspection reveals hundreds of sculptures, including a few concrete Dobermans guarding a cage that represents the cell at the Birmingham City Jail where Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in 1963 for protesting local segregation laws.
Minter, 81, lives on the property in a small blue house that he bought in the 1970s with money he made as a construction worker and from G.I. Bill loans. (He served during the Vietnam War era.) When he retired in 1989, he used the skills he’d learned on the job, and from his dad and brother, to create sculptural elegies to the victims of slavery and their descendants, condemning America for not paying reparations. Crooked signs with hand-painted messages like “U.S.A. Repent” and “Free at Last” cover Minter’s fence. Wiry and stooped, with an ash gray beard, he leads tours of the “African Village” in a blue hard hat, with a wooden shield that reads “Mandela” strapped to his back. He points out the “queen of the ‘African Village’” — a mattress spring to which are affixed tennis rackets sticking out like arms and a set of oven racks arrayed to suggest a headdress — and a conch seashell that “represents my ancestors lost in the Atlantic Ocean.” He tells his visitors, “I’ve never created nothing inside a building.”
For years, Minter’s work, which now occupies the lawns of two houses that he owns across the street, too, went noticed only by neighbors, who were largely tolerant, and other artists, like his fellow Alabamian Lonnie Holley, who began making assemblages out of salvaged materials on his property in Birmingham in the 1980s and who has called Minter a “hero.” Their creations are part of an outdoor artistic tradition sometimes called yard art, which has its origins in America in the 1800s but truly flourished in the mid-20th century, its rise concurrent with that of the single-family home. New technologies of mass production permitted the construction of affordable assembly-line homes, while the G.I. Bill and the availability of better mortgage terms after the war allowed greater numbers of working-class and, to some extent, nonwhite Americans to buy property. The yard became a symbol of the American dream and the site of a particularly American art form, an outdoor gallery to showcase one’s tastes — whether assimilationist (a white picket fence) or kitschy (pink flamingos). If suburban-style neighborhoods, within and outside of cities, represented conformity, they also became vast grounds for self-expression.
But it wasn’t until some of these middle-class areas went into decline that a more ambitious and even confrontational artistic impulse emerged. Influential yard art started appearing at the beginning of the 1980s, in neighborhoods that had been devastated by recessions and neglected by city governments. Artists, many of whom were Black or immigrants, used their property, and the discarded detritus around them, as a kind of canvas — a reminder that people were still living in these places, and a monument to all that had been left behind.
Yard art is often made by those who never attended art school. They’re frequently blue-collar workers who hold — or once held — manual labor jobs: Holley, for instance, picked up trash at a drive-in and dug graves. Some learned fabrication skills at work and had access to salvageable parts. Cities have often been hostile to these unsanctioned displays of art by so-called nonartists. In 1994, Birmingham condemned Holley’s wooded, two-acre yard environment, which he’d made over the course of 15 years, later bulldozing thousands of paintings and sculptures to clear the way for an airport expansion. “They made it into an art graveyard,” he’s said.
But now, as traditional art institutions re-evaluate their canons, they’re increasingly embracing these artists precisely because they’ve existed outside of them. Minter’s work is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. Tyree Guyton, 69, who makes art out of abandoned materials and houses in Detroit, is represented by Martos Gallery in New York. A show of yard art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that opened in July includes artists like Noah Purifoy, who spent 15 years working with junked materials on his property in Joshua Tree, Calif., and John Outterbridge, who made assemblages out of metal, wood and other scraps sourced from junkyards in Pasadena. What had once been thought of as a kind of outsider form is being celebrated as an influential movement that sought to use art to improve a community long before such an idea was taken as a given.
Yard art, then, finds itself at an unexpected crossroads, in demand by curators yet still under threat in the places where it’s made, subject to forces outside its creators’ control: unhappy neighbors, real estate developers, the weather. Its generational durability is also in doubt. For one thing, younger artists may not have the physical canvas that someone like Minter did. According to a Berkeley Institute for Young Americans analysis, a 30-year-old millennial was much less likely to own a home than a 30-year-old baby boomer. In many ways, yard art was a movement that could only prosper at a certain moment in America, and it seems likely that, as institutions navigate a life for these works beyond their in situ environments, the end of this art-historical era is near.
ONE OF THE first major works of yard art was by an Italian immigrant named Sabato “Simon” Rodia, a day laborer who built rebar towers, some nearly 100 feet tall, stitched together with wire and coated in mortar, behind his house in Watts, a diverse working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He worked obsessively on the project between 1921 and 1954, after which he moved north to live near his sister. The City of Los Angeles ordered its demolition, and it survived only because a graduate film student and an actor bought the property for $3,000 in 1959. (A few years later, Rodia was immortalized as one of the cardboard cutout figures on the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”) The structures are now a National Historic Landmark.
Rodia, like many yard artists, saw his work as a gift to the community; he called Watts Towers “Nuestro Pueblo,” or “Our Town.” Yet some of his neighbors viewed the assemblage more as blight than art. That’s also been the fate of Guyton’s “Heidelberg Project” since its inception 38 years ago. Heidelberg Street, the four-block-long thoroughfare on Detroit’s East Side where the artist was raised, was in an enclave of auto industry employees. It fell into disrepair as more and more families left the city after the uprisings against racial inequality that destroyed large portions of Detroit in the summer of 1967. After a stint in the army in the ’70s, Guyton returned to Heidelberg Street to find it in decline. A few years later, with the help of his grandfather, he transformed the area into a multiblock parade of found-art assemblages, painting vacant houses with polka dots and symbols and creating sculptures out of discarded children’s toys, old shoes, television sets and furniture. Word of the project grew, and it became a stop on the art pilgrimage circuit. On an afternoon in May, there were people visiting from around the world, and Guyton, a former firefighter and autoworker, was showing off what he’d been working on lately: a precariously stacked pile of shopping carts, a row of TVs on the sidewalk, an abandoned house with giant clocks painted on it.
While Guyton’s reputation as an artist has grown internationally, he’s spent decades being resented locally. Some of his neighbors have complained about him to authorities and even on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” In the 1990s, he twice watched the City of Detroit demolish the houses he’d painted — which were crack houses, burned-out buildings and other derelict spaces he’d chosen to draw attention to local officials’ neglect of his community. “You call the ‘Heidelberg Project’ an eyesore — what’s this?” he said, gesturing toward one house as he recalled past battles. The authorities only seemed to care about tearing down the houses once his art appeared on them, putting the artist’s plans in jeopardy. “We always had a vision of acquiring the land that we had been — I always say sharecropping — that we’d been taking care of,” Guyton’s wife, Jenenne Whitfield, said. Starting in 2013, a series of suspicious fires ruined even more of his work. Today, only two of the approximately 24 houses that he originally painted still stand. Last year, the organization that he and Whitfield founded to maintain the art and run community programs ran out of money and laid off its staff. “I cried like a baby,” he said. Still, Guyton, who once announced that he’d dismantle the “Heidelberg Project,” now has plans not only to maintain his work but to expand it.
The organization is still fund-raising, as Guyton bolsters his career outside of Heidelberg Street, finding the art world surprisingly easier to navigate than the place to which he’s devoted much of his adult life. The very artworks that some had ridiculed in Detroit are now being purchased by collectors. His sculptures have been accused of lowering property values; but take one to New York and it could be worth more than a house on Heidelberg. Guyton’s dealer said he can sell one of the artist’s sculptures for $40,000.
AS THE ARTISTS of Guyton’s and Minter’s generations age, the question of how to preserve their work has become more urgent. At a house across town in Hamtramck, a small, immigrant-dense city within Detroit’s borders, one arts nonprofit is offering a model of what might be done with a yard environment after its creator has died. Dmytro Szylak, who left Ukraine after World War II, started building a menagerie of mechanical toys, carousel horses and wooden windmills on top of his two backyard garages after he retired from a General Motors factory in the mid-80s. The installation, which he called “Hamtramck Disneyland,” soon towered over the alley on his compact block.
When Szylak died in 2015 at age 92, the property wound up in probate court and the future of his “Disneyland,” which was attracting thousands of visitors, was unclear. “There was a sense that maybe the Ukrainian community in Hamtramck wasn’t super into it because it’s a bit garish,” said Renee Willoughby, who takes care of the property on behalf of a nonprofit called Hatch Art, which was created in 2006 to support creative endeavors in Hamtramck. But unlike the “Heidelberg Project,” Szylak’s work generally received municipal support. After Szylak died, Hamtramck’s then-mayor, Karen Majewski, said the city was “committed to preserving this jewel, and the artist’s legacy.”
And while the yard-art tradition doesn’t seem to have a next generation of direct descendants creating open-air museums on their front lawns, a number of younger artists are still making neighborhoods central to their practice. They’re going about it in reverse order, however, using their art-world stature to acquire properties.
The 48-year-old painter Titus Kaphar’s foundation NXTHVN repurposed two disused factories in a historically Black neighborhood of New Haven, Conn., in the hopes of encouraging artists to settle in town rather than leave for New York after attending the Yale School of Art. And in Chicago, Theaster Gates, 51, who has a background in both urban planning and ceramics, and his Rebuild Foundation have bought up more than 40 properties across the city’s South Side to create housing, jobs and space for other community services. Many artists have looked to the house in historically Black neighborhoods as their subject, including Rick Lowe, 63, whose “Project Row Houses,” begun in 1993, involved restoring 22 homes in Houston’s Third Ward and now spans five city blocks and 39 structures, and Amanda Williams, 50, who’s painted houses slated for demolition on the South Side of Chicago in bright pink and yellow to call attention to their existence. Younger arts organizers are also playing a pivotal role in bringing renewed interest to the work of elder yard artists, including the Whitney Museum curator Rujeko Hockley, 40, who showed sculptures by Minter in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Matt Arnett, 56, who co-founded the Souls Grown Deep foundation for Black artists in the South with his brothers and late father, the author and collector Bill Arnett, said he’s been working with museums, foundations and private individuals to preserve Minter’s work — ideally on-site. But “the backup plan is to have the work saved … somewhere.” He hopes the uproar over the razing of Holley’s work will help prevent Birmingham from repeating its mistake with Minter: “I don’t think any city wants to be responsible for destroying two of the most important sites in America,” he says. Minter seems to be thinking a lot about what will happen to his work when he’s gone. It’s “up to the next generation to preserve it,” he said, “because me and my wife took it as far as we can in the hands of God and with what little resources we had.” He knows his art — like a neighborhood itself — will only survive if a community gets behind it. As another sign on the fence around Minter’s yard reads, “Come together or perish.”
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