American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces

5. Salvage/Salvation: Recent African American Yard Shows

5 Salvage/Salvation Recent African American Yard Shows John Beardsley Yard art is virtually ubiquitous in America. Decorated wagon wheels and tractor-tire planters, painted rocks and antlers, whirligigs and intricate mailboxes turn up from sea to shining sea, skipping only over the most relentlessly high-style neighborhoods: that the phenomenon is known as yard art rather than garden art is itself a clue to its social origins and to its place in vernacular culture . But among African Americans—and especially in the South—yard art has achieved a particularly vital cultural standing and a richly elaborate, often deeply coded, form of locution. At once the expression of artistic ambition, economic necessity, and emotional resilience, African American yard art is often sanctified as well, representing in a creolized language the spiritual and moral imperatives of its maker. African American yard art comes in many forms, from the apparently functional to the avowedly metaphysical. At the practical end of the scale, some yards are intended for subsistence gardening and outdoor living in the warmer months, with a secondary emphasis on leisure and entertainment. These yards, which sometimes have swept dirt surfaces, tend to be simply decorated with rock-encircled trees and flowerbeds, scattered planters made of washtubs and tires, and occasional gourd and bottle trees.1 From there, the phenomenon blossoms into the more intricate yard that serves as a studio and exhibition space for the resident’s painting and sculpture. At its most elaborate, yard art ranges Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM Page 89 all the way to the full-blown rhetorical display of the maker’s religious and social convictions, typically expressed through careful spatial orchestrations combined with text, paintings, root sculptures, and displays of salvaged materials such as bottles and mirrors, scrap metal and lumber, hubcaps, fans, and dolls. It is the yards at the more intricate end of the spectrum that are the subject of this essay—the forests of found objects worked into metaphors of salvation. Though outwardly chaotic, they often display an artistic and conceptual coherence that has earned them the special designation of “yard shows.” Art historian Robert Farris Thompson has identified several recurring themes or organizational principles in these “dressed” yards, such as “motion (wheels, tires, hubcaps, pinwheels); containment (jars, jugs, flasks, bottles . . . ); figuration (plaster icons, dolls, root sculptures, metal images); and medicine (special plantings of healing herbs by the door or along the sides of the house).” To Thompson ’s structural devices, anthropologist Grey Gundaker has added several others, including the use of filters against unwelcome influences, such as irregular pathways , sieves, and brooms; emblems of communication, such as antennae, electronic devices, and grills; and representations of power or authority, exemplified by special seats or thrones. In their view, the elements of the typical yard show are not mere decorations but go-betweens intended to summon a world of benevolent spirits and banish hostile ones. As Thompson writes, “Icons in the yard show may variously command the spirit to move, come in, be kept at bay, be entertained with a richness of images or be baffled with their density.”2 Although few of the makers of these yard shows explicitly link their creations to African sources, Thompson and Gundaker argue convincingly for parallels between African and African American forms of spiritual expression. For example , they link yard shows to the Kongo practices of placing protective charms around the home and decorating graves with the possessions of the deceased— in both instances, objects serve as interlocutors with the world of the spirits. But as they acknowledge, African practices were long ago creolized with European and American beliefs; expressions of African-based spirituality in these yards are far less explicit than Judeo -Christian ones. Moreover, a focus on the African sources of these yard shows can obscure their origins in personal experience and their relationship to a particularly contemporary social context. Yard shows resound with commentary on African American history and present-day political life; they also include celebrations of African American popular heroes. While the elements of the yard show might communicate with the world of the spirits, they also convey narratives of personal and community history that serve as affirmations of individual and collective identity. And while salvaged materials serve symbolic purposes, they also reflect (albeit some90 Identity Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM Page 90 times inadvertently) on a...