Yard Show
Not so very long ago, almost everyone in America participated in the familiar activity of building. Whether it was making a cabin or corral, barn or hen house, expressing one’s life through building and shaping space was a common activity. Today, building technology is so complex that we rely almost entirely on professionals for design and construction. Yet the yard and garden remain as realms where people with ordinary means and skills can shape space with their own hands to create a personal expression that is visible to all.
The exhibition, Yard Show, is the result of a collaboration between Texas Folklife, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts (SAMFA), and the landscape designer and author Jill Nokes. Nokes’ 2007 book, Yard Art and Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home (2007, UT Press) is the inspiration for this exhibit. The book features people who have transformed their homes and properties into uncommon personal displays.
Yard Show focuses on several of these distinctive places and their makers with photographs by Krista Whitson, Jill Nokes and Chuy Benitez, videos and sculptural elements borrowed from selected yards as well as new installations commissioned for the exhibit. The stories in Yard Show build vivid pictures of home that is more than just real estate and property values. Yard Show offers a lens for people to view their own communities, especially those overlooked neighborhoods where forgotten public histories and private memories may contribute to a greater sense of place.
These places have many meanings in the lives of the makers—they might be memorials, reliquaries and sacred spaces, or sculptural fantasies, landmarks or sites for the display of collections, visions of paradise, or even acts of reclamation for a depleted landscape. They may be seen as acts of civic generosity, creating spaces inviting to casual interactions with neighbors and strangers. As vernacular landscapes are rapidly replaced by new developments, people in every community might ask themselves, “What are those qualities that make my hometown special, and are worth celebrating and protecting?”
Yard Show was on view at SAMFA from September 24 to November 15, 2009, and is scheduled for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in the fall of 2010. Texas Folklife staff will consult with each venue on potential site specific installations. About the author, curator and photographers
Jill Nokes’ first book, How to Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest, has become a classic reference that has helped increase awareness of the value of native plants. She worked closely with Texas Folklife Executive Director Nancy Bless to shape this exhibit based on her book, Yard Art and Handmade Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home (2007, UT Press).
Yard Show has been made possible, in part, by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art, Humanities Texas, the Cogburn Family Foundation, the Still Water Foundation, the city of Austin through the Cultural Arts Division and the Texas Commission on the Arts, as well as contributions from the boards and members of Texas Folklife and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.