No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work.

No Space Hidden: The Spirit of African American Yard Work. By Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 237. $26.95, ISBN 1-57233-356-1.)

At a spring 1968 Yale University conference devoted to the evolving black studies movement, Robert Farris Thompson, a junior historian of African art, shared his new research on African-influenced creativity in the United States. Generously sharing his evidence, the interdisciplinary art historian launched a major field in African and African American studies that continues to thrive and enlighten. Following Thompson's impassioned lead, Grey Gundaker, an anthropologist who studied with Thompson at Yale, and Judith McWillie, an artist, curator, and studio art professor who first met Thompson in 1984, explore gardens and yards created, largely, by creative and energetic black Christian southern retirees "in the context of biblical and transatlantic visual and philosophical traditions" (p. 137).

The book is divided into six chapters that focus on the historical, philosophical, and religious contexts of African American yard work. Six portfolios that provide verbal and visual narratives of individual practitioners are interspersed between the chapters. The book dwells on the links between southern creativity, community life, expressive culture, spiritual engagement, and religious instruction. The authors draw on their observations of over two hundred yards since the 1970s, their long-term relationships and interviews with approximately thirty practitioners, a study of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century memoirs and accounts, and the Depression-era interviews of the Federal Writers' Project. They seek answers to the following questions: What are the foundations for the yards, and what do they communicate? Refuting what they see as a popular "folk/outsider" art discourse that understands vernacular creators as "local anomalies," they reveal how some African American yard environments can best be viewed not as random acts of eccentric individuals but as "contemporary manifestations of longstanding cultural integrities" (p. xv). For the authors, the recurrent practices and materials in many African American gardens and yards--including color coding, using reflective surfaces to invoke the divine, separating land into wild and cultivated zones, protecting home ground through the processes of tying and wrapping, honoring ancestors through the display of "experienced objects," and employing whitewashed, broken, and inverted objects, spiritual scripts, and twisted roots--have ties to the African diaspora. They pull from an array of "European, African, and American Indian resources" and serve as a thoughtful "means of mapping relations among matter, spirit, and human action onto the material world" (p. 10). Many of these practices show how "African-inflected perspectives" are present in "the heart and practice of Christianity in African America" (p. 181). Crucially, the sites they choose to study share a deep sense of religion and ethics. As the authors write, "Yard work involves many dimensions of labor and expression, but the yards in this book emphasize two interdependent ideas. First, they assert that land should be both protected from negativity and protective of its inhabitants. Second, they emphasize the dynamics of transformation: from seed into garden, from raw material into art, from existence into well-lived life, from willful individual into responsible adult, from burden into affirmation" (p. 153).

In close conversation with Robert Farris Thompson, whose work stresses the instructive underpinnings of creativity, Grey Gundaker and Judith McWillie thoughtfully share a generous community of yard work practitioners linked by the belief that "[r]ighteous use of land and righteous treatment of other people go hand in hand" (p. 158).

LISA GAIL COLLINS

Vassar College