Oct 12, 2017 – Feb 11, 2018
Washington Square Park

“What’s important to remember is that while barriers have been used to divide us, as humans we are all the same. Some are more privileged than others, but with that privilege comes a responsibility to do more.”
-Ai Weiwei

On October 12, Public Art Fund will unveil its 300+ site, 5-borough exhibition “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” by international artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei. A passionate response to the global refugee crisis and the political and social forces that seek to divide us from each other, the exhibition transforms the security fence into a powerful social and artistic symbol.

Join us on Wednesday October 11 from 5:30 to 6:30pm ​in ​Washington Square Park for a special public preview of the show with Ai Weiwei, Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume, and other passionate friends and supporters from our local and global community.

Rain or shine!
*Washington Square Park (just south of the Arch)
For more on the show, visit PublicArtFund.org.

As the culmination of its 40th Anniversary year, Public Art Fund will present the citywide exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, by world renowned artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei. Inspired by the international migration crisis and current global geopolitical landscape, the exhibition transforms the security fence into a powerful social and artistic symbol with interventions across the city. Large-scale, site-specific works will be installed at Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Central Park, the Washington Square Arch in Greenwich Village, and the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, in partnership with NYC Parks. These will be joined by site-specific interventions on top of and in between private buildings located at 48 East 7th Street, 189 Chrystie Street, 248 Bowery, and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art at Astor Place; a series of new flagpole-mounted works for the New York City Economic Development Corporation-managed Essex Street Market; and sculptural interventions around 10 JCDecaux bus shelters in partnership with the New York City Department of Transportation. In addition to these site-specific works, Ai has created a new series of 200 unique two-dimensional banners that will appear in all five boroughs on lampposts. The artist will also use spaces that traditionally feature advertising to showcase a new series of 98 documentary images from his research at refugee camps and national borders on JCDecaux bus shelters as well as Intersection’s LinkNYC kiosks citywide. A graphic work depicting the many forms of the global refugee crisis will appear on five JCDecaux newsstands in Manhattan. Each of the works will grow out of the existing urban infrastructure, using the fabric of the city as its base and drawing attention to the role of the fence in dividing people. In doing so, the artist highlights how this form, ubiquitous yet also potent, can alter how we perceive and relate to our environment.

Ai has particular empathy with displaced people. Growing up amid the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, Ai and his family were exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang Province where his father, a renowned poet who had been branded an enemy of the state, was made to clean the village’s communal toilets. Later he moved to New York City as an art student in the 1980s and experienced life as an immigrant in the U.S., where he pursued an interest in Western modern and contemporary art. Returning to China in 1993, Ai gained artistic success but also notoriety for his presence on social media and for using his art and public platform to engage with pressing political issues, eventually resulting in his 2011 arrest and detention by the Chinese government. Since the re-instatement of his passport in 2015, Ai has traveled to refugee camps across the globe and has dedicated much of his practice to bringing attention to the plight of displaced people, many of whom are victims of war or acts of terror. This global issue has gained a different relevance in the U.S. in the wake of new policies on immigration and border control, making the fence a particularly charged symbol of division and isolationism in this country.

“Ai Weiwei is unique in having combined the roles of preeminent contemporary artist, political dissident, and human rights activist in such a prominent and powerful way,” said Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume. “In many ways, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is the culmination of his work to date. It grows out of his personal experience of ‘otherness,’ his distinguished practice as both artist and architect, as well as his intensive research on the international refugee crisis and global rise of nationalism. At the same time, his long and formative history with New York has been deeply influential in the development of this exhibition.”

Since the late 1960s, experimental artists have used New York City as a canvas for their practice, intervening with public plazas, buildings, the city’s infrastructure, unused and abandoned spaces and more, to explore new ideas in public space and demonstrate the potential of the urban landscape to act as a platform for artistic expression. Public Art Fund grew out of this impulse, 40 years ago. Working in this tradition and inspired by minimal and conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s like Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Trisha Brown, Ai will create variations on the fence – from metal chain link to synthetic netting – to form interventions that adapt to their sites, as if growing out of urban space and changing how we relate to the fence and our environment. They will be installed in key locations around the city encouraging the public to engage with the city through the eyes of the artist.

With both local and global resonances, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors utilizes diverse sites across the city – in locations both iconic and community-oriented – that connect Ai’s personal story as an artist, activist, and immigrant, to the broader history of immigration in New York. These locations also highlight the city as a site for artistic intervention, and the charged socio-political moment reverberating around the world.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors is Ai Weiwei’s largest and most ambitious public art exhibition to date and will be on view October 12, 2017 – February 11, 2018, at 300+ sites across New York City.

This exhibition is curated by Public Art Fund Director & Chief Curator Nicholas Baume with the assistance of Associate Curator Daniel S. Palmer.