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,” situated on the lawn of his home, next to the historically Black cemetery where his father, wife and two sons are buried, 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. Discarded dolls, car parts and other found objects are grouped together by shape and color. As one gazes at the collection, forms emerge — steel bodies, cinder-block towers, outlines of rooms. Closer inspection reveals hundreds of sculptures, including a few concrete Dobermans guarding a cage that represents the cell at the Birmingham City Jail where Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned in 1963 for protesting local segregation laws.

Minter, 81, lives on the property in a small blue house that he bought in the 1970s with money he made as a construction worker and from G.I. Bill loans. (He served during the Vietnam War era.) When he retired in 1989, he used the skills he’d learned on the job, and from his dad and brother, to create sculptural elegies to the victims of slavery and their descendants, condemning America for not paying reparations. Crooked signs with hand-painted messages like “U.S.A. Repent” and “Free at Last” cover Minter’s fence. Wiry and stooped, with an ash gray beard, he leads tours of the “African Village” in a blue hard hat, with a wooden shield that reads “Mandela” strapped to his back. He points out the “queen of the ‘African Village’” — a mattress spring to which are affixed tennis rackets sticking out like arms and a set of oven racks arrayed to suggest a headdress — and a conch seashell that “represents my ancestors lost in the Atlantic Ocean.” He tells his visitors, “I’ve never created nothing inside a building.”

ImageThe view from the alley of “Hamtramck Disneyland,” created by the former General Motors employee Dmytro Szylak at his home near Detroit.Credit...Photo by Nicholas Calcott. Photo assistant: Ece Yavuz

For years, Minter’s work, which now occupies the lawns of two houses that he owns across the street, too, went noticed only by neighbors, who were largely tolerant, and other artists, like his fellow Alabamian Lonnie Holley, who began making assemblages out of salvaged materials on his property in Birmingham in the 1980s and who has called Minter a “hero.” Their creations are part of an outdoor artistic tradition sometimes called yard art, which has its origins in America in the 1800s but truly flourished in the mid-20th century, its rise concurrent with that of the single-family home. New technologies of mass production permitted the construction of affordable assembly-line homes, while the G.I. Bill and the availability of better mortgage terms after the war allowed greater numbers of working-class and, to some extent, nonwhite Americans to buy property. The yard became a symbol of the American dream and the site of a particularly American art form, an outdoor gallery to showcase one’s tastes — whether assimilationist (a white picket fence) or kitschy (pink flamingos). If suburban-style neighborhoods, within and outside of cities, represented conformity, they also became vast grounds for self-expression.

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.

ImageSzylak’s “Hamtramck Disneyland,” which he worked on from the ’80s until his death in 2015.Credit...Photo by Nicholas Calcott. Photo assistant: Ece Yavuz

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