“The fence has always been a tool in the vocabulary of political landscaping and evokes associations with words like ‘border,’ ‘security,’ and ‘neighbour,’ which are connected to the current global political environment,” the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says in a statement about his largest ever public art exhibition, Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, to be installed across New York later this year (12 October 2017-11 February 2018) for the 40th anniversary celebrations of the non-profit Public Art Fund. Wei—who lived in New York in the 1980s—will show a series of site-specific installations that play on the form of a wire security fence in multiple locations around the city, from Brooklyn bus shelters to the Cooper Union on Astor Place. “With Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, [Ai] challenges us to think about the function and rationale for a common barrier,” New York’s first lady Chirlaine McCray says in a statement. “Given that the immigrant experience is at the core of what binds us as New Yorkers, the exhibition compels us to question the rhetoric and policies that seek to divide us.”
