Author note: One week after submitting this article for publication, artist Antonio Lechuga was shot while jogging outside of his studio. He survived and is in stable condition. A GoFundMe has been set up to assist his family:
https://gofund.me/f68b9e8f
(With a quiet rage that threatens to consume him.)
– Fences by August Wilson, Act Two, Scene Two
Recently, over a glass of wine shared with a friend that I hadn’t seen in years thanks to a worldwide pandemic, I chewed on a small-talk question about traveling to another time in history. My answer was met with a look of confusion by the friend who had since become a stranger, through no real fault of our own, as everyone the world (it seemed) had become different people since our last shared bottle of wine.
March 26, 1987.
My answer was that I would travel to the Broadway debut of August Wilson’s Fences, starring James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, an emotionally tortured Black husband, father, and middle-aged sanitation worker. I had read the play a few evenings prior after receiving an invitation to an upcoming art exhibition with the same title.
Fences is a work of literature that I revisit once or twice a decade and gauge how I have changed by viewing my reflection in its mirror. I exist on the outside of it, of course. As a middle-class white woman navigating a world in which I have far more freedoms than I would have in the past (though fewer than I did only recently), I am in many ways a perfect opposite of Troy Maxson. Each time I engage with the work, though, I find that more and more of my experiences as a woman are reflected in the character of Rose, the wife who sacrifices of herself to carry the flawed protagonist of the story. And as I change, so does she.
I suspect this shift in meaning over time was the case for August Wilson, as well. The play’s script, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1987, is full of parentheticals describing the motivations of his characters. We experience this in-text when we read the play, and (one hopes) through the actors when they perform the work. (Both James Earl Jones as Troy and Mary Alice as Rose won Tony Awards for their performances in 1987, as did Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the 2010 revival of the work.)
In 2016, Fences was reimagined as a film, directed by Denzel Washington with both he and Viola Davis reprising their on-stage roles. (While critically acclaimed and nominated for a multitude of awards, it was only Viola Davis’ consuming portrayal of Rose that took home a Golden Globe.)
August Wilson wrote the screenplay for the movie, and the shift in form from the static nature of the stage to the more malleable nature of film resulted in a noticeable change in the parenthetical notes in the work. What he tells us about these characters, who they are and why they are, are in the screenplay newly interlocked with setting and camera vantage point. The opening scene, for example, shifts from Troy’s backyard in the play, to two men riding the back of a garbage truck in the film, and the opening screenplay parenthetical tells us that we are meant to see them from, “god’s point of view.”
But it is not just parenthetical notes on setting that Wilson shifted; the notes on the characters themselves also changed, as is to be expected after living with his characters for thirty years. The world had changed when August Wilson wrote the screenplay for the film; he had changed; Troy and Rose had to change as well.
One week after my evening spent chatting about Wilson’s play, Fences by artist Antonio Lechuga opened at Artspace111’s Love Texas Art gallery in Fort Worth, Texas. Three days later, a gunman walked into Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas and slaughtered nineteen children and two teachers.
In his Fences, Lechuga features his hard-line geometric paintings in bold colors that use shape and tonal color shifts to suggest perspective; there’s a sense of looking-up-and-through about them. Alongside these paintings is new sculptural work, large-scale structures of foam wrapped in fabric, cut and composed in a traditional diamond-shaped fence pattern.
Lechuga has wrapped the latticed forms in the fabric of Mexican cobijas, thick acrylic blankets in saturated colors, often featuring imagery of warriors, wolves, tigers, roses, la Virgen de Guadalupe, and Jesus Christ. The fence-like forms, most of them 6 to 8 foot wide by 8 to 10 foot tall, are assembled in layers, one in front of the other, offset vertically so that an x shape of the back form is present in the center of each diamond shape of the front. They are then presented mounted up against the wall, so that we must stand in front of them.
Though we see these works as barriers (similar to how paintings in their objectness are visually contained for a viewer), they are soft and inviting. We want to journey to these fences, to touch them, to be transported by them. And had I viewed this work at its opening, I would have interpreted it as a commentary on immigration, a reclaiming of a symbol of fear and division in order to challenge its collective social power.
But I saw this work five days after the shooting in Uvalde left me questioning how to continue to push forward with hope when hope seems so little. I stood before the monolithic sculptures wrapped in cobijas and I thought about the nineteen children and two teachers from a predominately Hispanic city with strong Mexican roots that were slaughtered in their classroom, and I wept. I thought about mothers wrapping their children in colorful blankets at bedtime, kissing them goodnight. I thought about the fences and doors that did not keep those children safe. I thought about the futility of relying on physical barriers to interrupt broken social structures. And over and over I thought about a line from Wilson’s play, where Troy’s longtime friend and coworker explains to him why Rose wants him to build a fence: “Some people build fences to keep people out… and other people build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on to you all. She loves you.”
Though Lechuga did not make the work in this show with any foresight about the tragedy in Uvalde, the context of that event came in with me when I entered the gallery, and it tucked itself alongside the associations of culture and family that the cobijas carry. I stood before those sculptures as memorials, and they were deafening.
Great art, if it exists as more than an art-historical marker, rises to meet us where and when we need it to. It meets the viewer in our time and space. It holds on to the ideas the artist imbued it with, while being malleable enough to adapt to individual human experiences and still speak to us. It strikes a balance between specificity and universality. In time, with distance from the Uvalde shooting and as Lechuga adds to this series, the work will shift. Other events will become part of the context of the work. And we may return to this work as it evolves, to look into its mirror again and see and the world around us reflected again and anew.