New ICA exhibit brings freedom of the yard into the gallery

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Artist and writer Josh Franco grew up in West Texas, where his grandfather used to make whimsical things out of found objects in the yard.

Hipolito Pole Hernandez, who died in 2015, did not call himself an artist. He just liked to make stuff.

“He had three little sheds in his backyard that were his workshops,” Franco said. “There were always sculptures, altered objects, all kinds of things coming out of them.”

Hernandez found a small windmill, painted it pink and affixed animal silhouettes: a hawk swooping down on a snake hovering next to a rabbit and a rooster. It describes a story, of a sort, about natural predators.

Franco included “Untitled (windmill)” in the exhibition “Where I Learned to Look: Art From the Yard” at the Institution of Contemporary Art at Penn, alongside other makers — so-called “outsider” artists who are not formally trained to giants of the fine art world, like Jeff Koons.

“One of the central questions of yard art, as a scholarly field, is ‘Why?’” he said. “Every artist has their own articulation of why they do it. In the text for the show we’ve used ‘world building.’ The one thing you can say that everybody shares is an impulse to build their own world.”