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> Yesterday's Tomorrows > Between Fences > New Harmonies > Key Ingredients |
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Between Fences 
We live between fences. Whether we need, despise or ignore them, Americans are surrounded by fences. Thousands of types have been invented, millions of miles have been produced, and countless rivals have seized post, rail, panel, and wire to stake their claims. In 1871, the Department of Agriculture estimated the total value of fences in the United States at 1.7 billion, a sum almost equal to the national debt. Our past is defined by the cutting point of barbed steel and the staccato rhythm of the white picket. Built of hedge, concrete, wood and metal, the fence skirts our properties and is central to the American landscape.
The United States as we know it could not have been settled and built without fences; they continue to be an integral part of the nation. Fences stand for security: we use them to enclose our houses and neighborhoods. They are decorative structures that are as much part of the landscape as trees and flowers. Industry and agriculture without fences would be difficult to imagine. Private ownership of land would be an abstract concept. But fences are more than functional objects. They are powerful symbols. The way we define ourselves as individuals and as a nation becomes concrete in how we build fences. Between Fences considers the fence in American history and culture. It challenges viewers to consider both how literal fences have shaped the American landscape and how we define ourselves metaphorically with borders and boundaries. What other fences—train tracks, mountain ranges, international borders—separate us?
The Tour
More about the Exhibition 
Fence Quotations"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society." Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse of the Origin of Inequality, 1754 "I am not surprised that our mode of [worm] fencing should be disgusting to a European eye... for no sort of fencing is more expensive or wasteful of timber." George Washington, from a letter to William Strickland, 1797 "If a man owns land, the land owns him." Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth, 1860 
"One who extends her arm over a fence dividing her own premises from those of another is a trespasser, though her body remains on her own side of the fence." Conclusion reached by the Supreme Court of Iowa in 1902 concerning a dispute between neighboring families in Pottawattamie County, Iowa He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors". Robert Frost, Mending Wall, 1935 
"The fence and the boundary line are the symbols of the spirit of justice. They set the limits upon each man's interest to prevent one from taking advantage of the other."Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 1943 "A boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins." Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking, 1954 "White painted wood picket fences are required at the street front and path front property lines... Individual fence patterns shall not replicate another on the same street... White paint shall be selected from one of the following manufacturer's stock numbers..." The Architectural Code of Seaside, FL For more information about Between Fences please contact at (206) 682-1770. to top | Back to Exhibits
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Humanities Washington toured the exhibit to six small and rural museums in Washington State in 2005-2006:
Curated by Gregory K. Dreicer of Chicken and Egg Public Projects, Inc., Between Fences focuses on every region of the United States. Its subjects include the defining of home, farm, and factory; the settling of the United States; the closing of the range in the South and its meaning to former slaves; and the making of fences, including a look at why Abe Lincoln became known as a rail splitter. It examines human relationships on an expending scale: neighbor versus neighbor; gated communities; and the Mexican and Canadian borders of the U.S. The exhibition tells American stories through diverse fence types. The worm fence, one of the most widely built types in American history, attracted the attention of many eighteenth and nineteenth-century visitors to the United States; its unique design contributed to international understanding of American society. The picket fence plays a legendary role in the United States: it is the very symbol of home. Battles between farmers and ranchers, fought with barbed wire fence, were flash points in the nationwide debate over enclosure and access to land and resources. The chain link fence has come to surround playgrounds, factories, and houses. The industrialization of the fence—and with it, land and house—is essential for understanding contemporary life.
Fences define, protect, confine, and liberate. They tell us where we belong and who we are in relation to others. Fences join the public and private. Remove a fence; invite chaos. Erect a fence; you are home.