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Yard and Roadside Art by Dr. Michael Ann Williams, Western Kentucky Unviersity
You don'st even have to get off the road to see art in Kentucky. Of course, there is "public art," art created by commissioned artists in public places. Then there is the art created in yards and along the highways by everyday folks, as well as by some highly unusual individuals. Art along Kentucky's highways celebrates beauty, natural and constructed; it commemorates individuals; it recognizes the passage of seasons; and it expresses personal beliefs.
Why do people create art in their own yards?
Many people wish to beautify their surroundings, as well as share their
creativity and talents with those passing by. The most modest home can be
elevated to a thing of beauty with an exuberant display of colorful flowers
decorating the yard that surrounds it. Plants don't have to be ornamentals,
however, to be treated as art. The well-designed and tended vegetable garden
or the carefully mown field can also be objects of beauty to be appreciated
by both the owner and the passing motorist.
Nature is not the only medium in which the yard artist works. Recycling
is sometimes part of this art form. The old tire, painted white and cut
open to look like a flower in bloom, becomes a planter. Soft drink bottles,
as well as dried gourds, are transformed into bird feeders and houses. Even
the discount store supplies materials for lawn art. While it may not seem
much like "art" to purchase a few ornaments at the store and place
them in the yard, store-bought items are often mixed with each other or
with handmade objects in unique and artistic assemblages.
Elizabeth Bullington with her handmade madonna shrine in Owensboro. Photo by Chris Antonsen.
The art is in the combining and arranging. In yard art, artificial materials can replicate nature. While plants and flowers stay put, animals do not. Wild birds, deer, rabbits, and squirrels become tamed or domesticated through their re-creation in yard art. Curiously it is less often city folk (who often lack these critters in their own neighborhoods) who are most likely to put up concrete or wooden representations of wildlife in their yard. Usually it is rural and suburban people, who at other times may see these animals as pests and nuisances. As yard art the wild animals form peaceful family groups; they are not hunted for food, nor are they raiding the garden. Sometimes these animals become quite civilized, sporting human clothes or decorated for holidays.
All outside art is to some degree seasonal in nature. The seasons shape the surrounding context of the art and the natural materials available. Some of this art expresses the passing of the seasons. Holiday yard art celebrates not only Halloween, Christmas, or Easter, but also the changing of seasons from autumn to winter to spring. Of these holidays, Halloween is perhaps the most exuberantly celebrated in forms of yard art. The art of this holiday curiously juxtaposes images of the passing of the yearly seasonal cycle with that of the human life cycle. Traditional symbols of the harvest, corn sheaves and gourds, are mixed with symbols of death. The scarecrow may stand side by side with a skeleton or ghost. The natural pumpkin, another symbol of the harvest, is transformed into a frightening (or sometimes humorous) ghoul. A striking aspect of Halloween art is how lightly death is treated. Images of death abound in playful, and often funny, forms. One time a year, it is permissible to laugh in the face of death.
Humor plays an important role in many forms of yard art. The functional mailbox takes on fantastic forms as kittens and cows, trucks and tractors. Then there is the wag who places a separate airmail box way up high above the other mailbox. Whirligigs also have a strong element of visual humor, with birds, animals, and people wildly flailing their wings, legs, or arms on a windy day. Like many other forms of folk art, whirligigs combine a decorative element with some degree of practical function. The motion of the moving parts creates a vibration in the supporting stick which is believed to discourage moles. A more recent form of humorous yard art that is growing increasingly popular in rural areas is the slightly off-color representations of young men "watering" the yard or women inadvertently revealing their undies as they lean over. If yard decoration is a form of art, it is also a form of play.
Other forms of outside art represent deeply held beliefs. Most forms of holidays decoration emphasize the popular and secular aspects of holiday, rather than the religious. Easter bunnies and egg trees are far more common than crosses and crucifixions as holiday yard art. Christmas may be the exception; nativity scenes sometimes compete, or coexist, with Santa Clauses. Year-round outside religious statuary is most common in traditionally Catholic communities in Kentucky. Again, store-bought and homemade items are often combined. Artistic recycling may even play a role, as in the so-called "bathtub Madonna," which uses an upended and half-sunken tub as the backdrop for a yard shrine.
Other Christians are more apt to use crosses, sometimes inscribed with religious messages, to express their deeply held beliefs. More inclined to proselytizing, those who erect crosses outside seldom confine them to their own yards, but spread their messages along the highway. One Kentuckian, Harrison Mayes, devoted much of his life to erecting crosses and religious signs along the highways across the United States. Mayes was also one of the unusual individuals who took the decoration of his home beyond the boundaries of conventional creativity. The house, known as "Air Castle," was shaped in the form of a cross, with the message "Jesus Saves" painted across the roof so it could be read from an airplane.
Finally, public expressions of grief have increasingly found a place along Kentucky's roads and highways. As the roads become more treacherous, the victims of highway accidents are more frequently becoming memorialized at the places where they lost their lives. Perhaps some may believe it wrong to see roadside memorials as a form of art. But as in cemetery decorations, the creation of beauty plays an important role in the public expression of mourning. While the simplest roadside memorials may only be a cross, sometimes bearing a name and date of death, many are decorated with artificial flowers, ribbons, photographs, and objects loved by the individuals who lost their life. These memorials serve as the most public expression of loss, but also as warnings to the living. Deaths from accidents that are alcohol related are the most frequently memorialized along the highway itself.
Yard and roadside art reveals much about the nature of Kentuckians. Without ever getting out of our cars, we find expressions of their creativity and love of beauty, their sense of humor and their deeply held beliefs, a celebration of the passing of the seasons, and the memorializing of a passing of a life.
