Nicholas Calcott

Yard Art

T: The New York Times Style Magazine

Reportage

2024

"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."

The outdoor art of Tyree Gutton, Joe Minter, and Dmytro Szylak.

Some Of America's Best Art Is In The Yard

, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, 9/27/2024

Project Details

Writer: Rachel Corbett Photo Editor: Esin Goknar Photo Director: Nadia Vellam

"After a stint in the army in the ’70s, [Tyree] Guyton returned to Heidelberg Street [in Detroit] 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."
"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” [...] 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."
"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."
Gardens

Harrison Green

Architecture & Interiors

20192024