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<title>MCLC: Ai Weiwei's Good Fences Make Good Neighbors</title>
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<h3 style="margin-top:0;"><a style="font-weight: 500; font-size: 21px;line-height: 30px; margin-top:25px; margin-bottom: 10px;" href="http://u.osu.edu/mclc/2017/04/01/ai-weiweis-good-fences-make-good-neighbors/" target="_blank">Ai Weiwei’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors</a></h3>
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<p>Source: NYT (3/26/17)<br />
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/arts/design/ai-weiweis-latest-artwork-building-fences-throughout-new-york-city.html">Ai Weiwei’s Latest Artwork: Building Fences Throughout New York City</a><br />
By JOSHUA BARONE</p>
<p class="p9"><span class="s6"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/ai_weiwei/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Ai Weiwei</a></span><span class="s1">, the provocative Chinese artist, will build more than 100 fences and installations around New York City this fall for “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” one of his most large-scale public art projects to date.</span></p>
<p class="p9"><span class="s1">The exhibition, which opens on Oct. 12, was commissioned by the <a href="https://www.publicartfund.org/"><span class="s7">Public Art Fund</span></a> to celebrate the organization’s 40th anniversary and will comprise about 10 major fence-themed installations and scores of smaller works spread across multiple boroughs, including Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.</span></p>
<p class="p9"><span class="s1">“This is the most ambitious that we’ve undertaken since I’ve been here,” said Nicholas Baume, who has been the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/public_art_fund/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><span class="s7">Public Art Fund</span></a>’s director and chief curator since 2009. “Certainly, it’s the most distributed throughout the city.”</span></p>
<p class="p9"><span class="s1">Throughout its history, the Public Art Fund has commissioned major artists like Alexander Calder and Sol LeWitt, and has funded seminal works like Olafur Eliasson’s “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/arts/design/27wate.html"><span class="s7">The New York City Waterfalls</span></a>” in 2008 and Tatzu Nishi’s “Discovering Columbus” in 2012.</span></p>
<p class="p9"><span class="s1">Among the planned sites for Mr. Ai’s project are Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, the Cooper Union building in Manhattan and Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at the tourist-heavy southeast corner of Central Park.</span></p>
<p class="p23"><span class="s1">The title is a reference to Robert Frost’s poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44266"><span class="s7">Mending Wall</span></a>,” which uses the line “Good fences make good neighbors” as a mysterious refrain. Mr. Ai, who lived in New York during the 1980s, said in an email that this work is a reaction to “a retreat from the essential attitude of openness” in American politics.</span></p>
<p class="p23"><span class="s1">“When the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/b/berlin_wall/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><span class="s7">Berlin Wall</span></a> fell, there were 11 countries with border fences and walls,” Mr. Ai said. “By 2016, that number had increased to 70. We are witnessing a rise in nationalism, an increase in the closure of borders, and an exclusionary attitude towards migrants and refugees, the victims of war and the casualties of globalization.”</span></p>
<p class="p23"><span class="s1">Other recent artwork by Mr. Ai has similarly dealt with heated current events, such as the exhibition “<a href="http://www.deitch.com/current"><span class="s7">Laundromat</span></a>,” which included thousands of castoff items from a refugee camp, at Deitch Projects last fall. And in June, “<a href="http://www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/hansel_gretel"><span class="s7">Hansel & Gretel</span></a>,” a surveillance-themed installation created with the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, will open at the Park Avenue Armory.</span></p>
<p class="p23"><span class="s1">“Ai Weiwei pours his heart and soul into art that asks big questions and is not constrained by artistic and social traditions,” Chirlane McCray, the first lady of New York, said in a statement. With “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” she added, “he challenges us to think about the function and rationale for a common barrier. 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.”</span></p>
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by <a href="mailto:denton.2@osu.edu">denton.2@osu.edu</a> on April 1, 2017 </div>
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