Back Porch with Picnic Table, 1985

Back Porch with Picnic Table comes out of an approach to art that started in the late 1960s, when artists focused on everyday architecture and objects of daily use rather than on utopian or imaginary forms. It is based on a screened-in porch common to homes in Minneapolis, the city where artist Siah Armajani settled after moving to the US from Iran in 1960. Armajani’s investigation of a vernacular, or ordinary, domestic physical structure allowed him to consider how architecture configures social behavior. Text from David Antin’s poem “regarding a door” (1965), inscribed around the installation, expands upon Armajani’s understanding of architecture as “a tool which directs us into a place for living, sitting, resting, reading, eating, and talking.” Visitors are invited to engage in the simple but fundamental act of sharing communal space within a built environment.