WHERE I LEARNED TO LOOK: Art from the Yard
WHERE I LEARNED TO LOOK: Art from the Yard
Curated by Josh T Franco
On view at the El Pomar Galleries, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College and The Yard
March 6 – July 25, 2026
Opening Friday, March 6, 5-8pm
Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard celebrates the foundational role of yards in shaping contemporary art in America. Building upon existing scholarship on Yard Art, artwork created to exist in the transitional space between the home and wider world, artist and art historian Josh T Franco examines the lineage of this robust American art form. Featuring over 30 works, the exhibition spotlights both community and academically taught artists over the past five decades including David Driskell, vanessa german, Donald Judd, and Finnegan Shannon, revealing connections across communities in creative world-building with what is available.
Where I Learned to Look: Art from the Yard is curated by artist and art historian Josh T Franco in partnership with Katja Rivera, Curator of Contemporary Art at Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.
fac.coloradocollege.edu/exhibits/where-i-learned-to-look-art-from-the-yard
Curator’s Statement
When my grandfather, a prolific yard artist, passed away, I photographed his yard as an
act of mourning. My brothers, cousins, and I spent hours interpreting, inventing, and
collaborating in his elaborate, hand-built environments. These were the unexpected
training grounds for my earliest exercises in close observation, a skill central to my work
as an art historian. My grandfather’s yard is where I learned to look.
For the artists in this show, a yard can be a patch of grass, a strip of sidewalk, a
fencepost, the open woods, even a notebook. These are sites of nourishment in multiple
senses, providing sustenance for cultural memory. In their dedication to the yard, the
artists foreground marginal or transitional spaces—in this case, the one between home
and the wider world—as vital for inspiring, making, and interpreting art. Moreover, yard
art demonstrates a persistent impulse toward world building across diverse places,
makers, media, and audiences.
This field of everyday art making encompasses a wide range of styles—from intricate to
utilitarian, prefabricated to handmade—and can be inspired by everything from familial
connections to popular culture. Art from the yard counters the assumption that creative
production and interpretation are bound to the studio, the academy, the museum, and the
gallery.
Welcome to the yard.
-Josh T Franco
Josh T Franco (b. 1985) is an artist and art historian from West Texas who believes that art history is made by hand.
As an artist, Franco’s primary medium is the discipline of art history itself. Using performance and a variety of materials, he transforms the components of being an art historian—reading, writing, annotating, sketching, lecturing, looking, museum going, archival research and so on—into artworks appropriate for museums and galleries and their audiences. Franco’s art has been exhibited and supported by Co-Lab Projects, Esperanza Peace & Justice Center, WorkSpaceBrussels, Mini Art Museum, NurtureArt Gallery, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, DePauw University, HistoryMiami Museum, Studio SoHy, Elsewhere Museum, Addison Gallery of American Art, Agave Festival Marfa, Zygote Press, The Future Mpls, 516ARTS, Olga Korper Gallery, Albuquerque Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Davis Gallery, Syracuse University Art Museum, Art Bridges Foundation, Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, ICA Philadelphia, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. In 2025-2026, Franco is NEH Innovator in Residence at Colorado College.
As an art historian, Franco has presented scholarly and critical work in venues including Stanford University, College Art Association, Utrecht University, HEMI Graduate Student Initiative (Hemispheric Institute), zingmagazine, The Frick Collection, Third Text, Latino Art Now!, Joan Mitchell Foundation, OCTOBER, Independent Curators International, Gulf Coast, Latino Studies, and The Journal of Feminist Scholarship. He has written exhibition-related text for Theaster Gates, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Charlotte Hallberg, Zoe Leonard, Miguel Luciano, Hiram Maristany, and Joshua Saunders among others. In 2025, he was a Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Franco’s book, Marfa, Marfa: Rasquachismo and Minimalism in Far West Texas, forthcoming with Duke University Press, is supported by a Terra Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. His dissertation on the same subject was completed at Binghamton University (2016). He completed a BA in Art History at Southwestern University (2007).