photo by: Contributed

left to right, Roman Jasso, artist Jeremy Rockwell, and Gabriel Ortiz moving the La Yarda installation to the Lawrence Arts Center.

A new exhibit opening this coming week at the Lawrence Arts Center aspires to take people back in time to a “magical” community that was home to Mexican American railroad workers and their families from 1920 to 1951.

The exhibit, “Finding La Yarda,” has been in the works for two years, and project director Marlo Angell said it combines architecture, ceramics, videography, photography and more to create an interactive scene from the La Yarda complex.

Visitors to the Arts Center exhibit will find a re-creation of the courtyard of La Yarda’s U-shaped brick apartment buildings, complete with sights and sounds of the community — flowers; the clacking of trains; an old well; and a walnut tree, underneath which the community gathered for meals and children played. Some of those children are still alive today and shared their memories with the artists during the creation of the exhibit.

“They always talk about how magical their memories are,” Angell said. “Residents who lived there at the time were young children, and they tell us it was just like a fairyland, and that there were so many flowers, and it was such a beautiful place,”

From the courtyard, visitors can walk up to the porch and into the apartment building itself. Inside, the artists re-created a room that contains both sleeping quarters and a kitchen space.

“We re-created a kitchen and a bedroom area so you can see what eating and sleeping was like back then and experience a lot of the closeness and proximity that residents shared,” Angell said.

photo by: Contributed

Former La Yarda residents Pedro Romero and Teresa Martinez visit the “Finding La Yarda” exhibit during construction.

The La Yarda community dispersed into the greater Lawrence community and beyond when the Kaw River flooded in 1951 and rendered the complex uninhabitable. Some of its former residents still live in Lawrence and would like to see something more done with the land where La Yarda stood near Eighth and Delaware streets.

“The families are really passionate about doing something on the land at some point, but the (BNSF) railroad owns the land and doesn’t want anything done with it at the moment,” Angell said.

photo by: Contributed

Photographs of former La Yarda residents on display on the Lawrence Loop near Eighth and Delaware Streets on Saturday August 3, 2024.

Angell said the involvement of the still-living residents has been crucial to the creation of the exhibit and that the artists have worked to make sure they are telling the story of La Yarda “not about them, but with them.”

While the exhibit has been built in the Arts Center several blocks away from the original site, an extension of the exhibit will be nearby along the fence line of the recently finished segment of the Lawrence Loop. Large portraits of the still-living former residents of La Yarda will be displayed just across the street from the historic Poehler Mercantile building, near where the foundations for the La Yarda apartment buildings still poke out of the ground.

“La Yarda was built in the ’20s, but there were Mexican Americans who came to live here prior to that and lived in boxcars and worked on the railroad,” Angell said, adding that the exhibit “is really about celebrating their contributions to Lawrence, which is really a part of the cultural fabric of Lawrence.”

Angell said the exhibit has been built in such a way that it can be dismantled and used as a traveling exhibit. Although the story of La Yarda happened in Lawrence, Angell said, it’s a reflection of Mexican American culture throughout the Midwest.

The exhibit will open with a reception on Friday, Aug. 9, from 6 to 9 p.m. Former La Yarda residents will be there, and attendees will have the chance to walk down to the installation at Eighth and Delaware. From there, the exhibit will remain on display through Sept. 21.

Throughout the five-week run of “Finding La Yarda,” the Arts Center will have additional events and talks about the installation. For more information and a calendar of events, visit lawrenceartscenter.org.

photo by: Contributed

A ceramic work called Father Carrying Water (Padre llevando Agua) by Jonathan Christensen Caballero who created additional works for the “Finding La Yarda” exhibit.