The backyard of the West Fort Worth bungalow that Francisco Josué Alvarado Araujo shares with two artist housemates, an elderly sheepdog, and a territorial Bichon Frise is an unlikely setting for a sculpture garden. Set off the street behind a jumble of vines that encircle the trunk of a dead tree, the house is slow to reveal itself. The home itself acts as a kind of portal to Alvarado Araujo’s backyard studio en plein air. Through the kitchen door is a generous lawn occupied by ample and precariously arranged bits of junk. The contents of two sheds appear to have been exploded by an extremely thoughtful and careful bomb: A shopping cart flies upside-down atop two staggered metal pipes. (“It was an intrusive thought,” he says.) A folded tarp stands up with a wide stance on its rolled-up legs, like the sheriff in an old cowboy movie. (It elegantly slumps over a few minutes before I depart.) Weathered chairs, ladders, watering cans, and indeterminable metal pieces of infinite variety are half-stored and half-sculpted in neat yet illogical stacks.
The 35-year-old Alvarado Araujo is best known for installations of impossibly balanced found objects that are as graceful and spare as they are volatile and slightly stressful. Much of the work included in his 2024 exhibition at Jessamine, an artist-run gallery in the former Belmont Hotel in Dallas, and numerous constructions that appeared in his backyard this May, maintain a tenuous equilibrium between objects whose precise shape and weight helps them stay together as if by fate. Each gives the impression of being displaced from homes where they’ve spent long lives being lounged upon or comfortably tucked on a shelf. His daily studio practice involves sitting on an upturned bucket, looking out at his collection, making some sketches from observation, and gathering the “courage or energy” to try a new arrangement. “If it doesn’t work,” he says, “I let it fall apart.”
One function of Alvarado Araujo’s backyard studio is a repository for these objects. A gleaner of urban sprawl, Alvarado Araujo cruises the metroplex in a white pickup, filling the bed with pieces of furniture, gardening tools, chunks of Styrofoam, old audiovisual equipment, and other bits and pieces with distinctive personalities, granted by their time in Texan homes as well as a certain outdated solidness of build. In contrast to other assemblage artists of his generation who search out the cheap, plentiful, and quickly cast-off debris of contemporary life, Alvarado Araujo’s métier is decidedly less attached to the consumerist moment we inhabit. He seems to cherish the things he finds, declaring each special—“it doesn’t seem like commercially manufactured stuff”—and describing how long he’s had them or where they came from, as one describes treasured pets.
Choosing materials that appear so formed by their histories creates opportunities for these things to reflect Alvarado Araujo’s own personal history and family ties. Born in Matehuala, Mexico, Alvarado Araujo moved to Fort Worth with his family as a child. Due to legal obstacles, he couldn’t return until last year. Back in his birthplace, Alvarado Araujo found himself feeling disconnected. “There was this aspiration to go back, but once I did, there was nothing to go back to. That showed me that home can be anywhere.” In his work, home and family appear in unlikely guises and esoteric gestures. The number five, for himself and his four siblings, reoccurs in the number of constituent elements in several sculptures. Pointing rhythmically to two lengths of faded wood held parallel by five diagonally leaning pieces of metal pipe, Alvarado Araujo declares “boy, girl, boy, girl; there are three of these metal pieces like us brothers, but one of them is always falling over. That made me think: That’s us.”
The garden highlights the phenomenon in any artist’s studio of a fluidity between materials, ideas, experiments, and fully fledged artworks—how that process of transformation isn’t always linear, how things sometimes (in Alvarado Araujo’s case, quite literally) fall apart. “A lot of [this] stuff has been in shows,” Alvarado Araujo says, gesturing to a row of bicycles staked through with a weathered two-by-four and a pair of lawn chairs spliced vertically together. “But once the display is over, it just goes back to being material. I have to store it somewhere and so it has to come apart.” The same objects appear and reappear in different sculptures, either in exhibitions or as experiments in the backyard. Like dancers in a company, they take on different moods and characters. He makes the connection to his memories of life in Mexico, in communities where new things are scarcer and possessions are habitually repurposed and exchanged. Held onto for longer, they play many parts in their lifetimes.
Although he reuses the same objects, it’s difficult for Alvarado Araujo to make the same sculpture twice. He recounts the time that ar.ti.cu.la(ME), a wonderfully anarchic snarl of metal lockers wedged together with rubber exercise balls, fell apart at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on a hot day. The conditions of a venue, and the changing quality of the materials themselves as they sit out in Alvarado Araujo’s yard, create a volatile and always potentially kinetic installation. In his yard that afternoon, I thought about the terms in which virtually every system, institution, and industry is described in our current climate as broken, and about the radicality and grace of Alvarado Araujo’s practice of simply letting things collapse. If something doesn’t work, doesn’t fit, it doesn’t get thrown away, but repurposed and recombined into something totally new and sometimes altogether stronger.
The neighbors give the backyard studio a mixed review, for which Alvarado Araujo doesn’t seem to blame them. But, as he says, “It’s hard to change what you think is nice.” He asks, “Is this art?” looking at a weathered orange Ikea chair. “I feel great after moving it and organizing it. I don’t know if it’s art; that in-between place is beautiful.” When I ask if he knows when something is done, he says that he does. “Yes. If it’s exciting.”
Captions:
All images from Francisco Josué Alvarado Araujo's backyard workspace in Fort Worth, Texas, 2025. Photos by Adrienne Lichliter-Hines