Sally Yard on John Baldessari

Sally Yard, PhD, joined the faculty at the University of San Diego in 1989, and served as chair of the department of Art from 1992 through 1997. Yard writes about art since the second world war. Her research interests stretch from the emergence of abstract expressionism in the United States to the relationship of art and its publics—whether in the contentious terrain of San Diego / Tijuana or the reflective realm of a museum garden.

Sally Yard’s work on the relationship of art and its publics includes the book Christo: Oceanfront (Princeton University Press), as well as essays in Robert Irwin (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Rizzoli, 1993); Museum as Muse (Museum of Modern Art, New York and Abrams, 1999); along with Private Time in Public Space (1998), Fugitive Spaces (2002), and A Dynamic Equilibrium: In Pursuit of Public Terrain (2007) (Installation Gallery, San Diego and Instituto Nacional de Bellas Arts, Mexico). She has also written on postwar painting: Francis Bacon: A Retrospective (The Trust for Museum Exhibitions and Abrams, 1999) and Willem de Kooning(Poligrafa, Barcelona, 2007). She is currently at work on a book with Robert Irwin, the first artist to receive a MacArthur Foundation Award.

Yard is founding director and board president of CoTA: Collaborations of Teachers and Artists, a program that links artists and elementary school teachers in National School District, Chula Vista Elementary School District, and San Diego Unified School District. She has curated exhibitions for institutions throughout the United States, and has served as faculty curator for the Hoehn Family Print Study Collection and Galleries at USD.

Yard’s undergraduate thesis, at Harvard University, focused on Early Matisse and the “Decorative”; her doctoral dissertation, at Princeton University, considered Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Years in New York—1927-1952.