That #%*! wall.

Let me tell you about my neighbors for a minute.

I’ve been stewing in neighborly animosity for these past few months. I’m never much of a neighbor person—I want my home to be a hermetically sealed bubble of restorative solitude—but since March, my neighbors out here have been developing an enormous cinder block wall between our properties. It’s ugly and poorly built, an aggressive divider that stands seven-feet high and continues for 130 feet along the entire width of my yard. And it’s taking forever: we are in an uncomfortable limbo of construction and frustration that stretches for months. My daily meditation has been to refocus my anger into more helpful emotions, and mostly I am failing. At least I won’t have to see my neighbors anymore, I tell myself, taking deep breaths.

I don’t like neighbors, but there is still something sad to me about the imposition of the wall. Before, we would chat across the chain link fence. They would bring over batches of home-made salsa, or used knock-off Coach bags. They would offer unsolicited advice about my garden. Their dog would run the length of the fence, playfully teasing mine. It was my most active engagement with people so deeply different than me: different political ideas, different familial relationships, different aesthetic preferences, different personal histories, different relationships to land and community. Every day, my world collided with theirs. It was annoying, but it was also important, expanding my island into a small world that required me to step out of my normal zones of contact. Being a neighbor requires me to own my discomfort.

It’s such a simple and fundamental principle of American idealism: we are different and yet we make space to be alongside one another, to learn from each other, to annoy ourselves. We are made better and more expansive by engaging with difference in non-violent, daily interactions.

This wall, though, seems symbolic of larger impulses across American life. Heightened by the pandemic, our national belief that individualism is the pinnacle of freedom allows personal tendencies, ambivalences, and biases to grow unchecked. I can double down into my way of seeing the world, and they can forget about the progressive city slicker who moved in next to them and lets her weeds grow tall. We no longer speak to one another, as the frustrations with this wall-build continue to fracture our neighborly responsibilities. Rather than facing our conflict with constant interactions and small exchanges, we are turning to silent resentment.

At a small scale, this cinder block wall reflects a way of being in the world that is very similar to how much of the media we consume fragments our communities. To block or cancel a contact is much easier than to untangle differences, and tease apart conflict. Not understanding someone else’s experiences and needs can be a reason to end a relationship entirely. And conflict can escalate tremendously—and fast!—without the balm of home-made salsa passed across a fence: which is to say, physical presence and proximity (and food!) is so important for de-escalation. Unsolicited advice about my garden needles me, but it also makes me rethink my decisions and try to clarify my motivations. What I mean is: building a wall rarely fixes a thing (no offense, Robert Frost).

I’m not saying I know how to unbuild walls. And I’m regularly guilty of going into isolated-silence-mode when the conflict seems too big. But this impulse is to my detriment, to our detriment. My grandparents were adept at a carefully timed casserole delivery, a kind of unstated potluck therapy: community meant something different to them, enacted their values in small daily gestures of care. I regularly grieve the ways in which I am cut off from the places and people that raised me, how our impasses have grown seemingly insurmountable in recent years. We don’t know how to talk to one another any more. And I don’t think I’m alone with these emotional chasms growing deeper and darker.

Perhaps this has nothing whatsoever to do with your studio practice. But I wonder about the ways in which people in the arts sometimes silo themselves into communities of shared affect (yes, that italicized sometimes is a little side-eye, you read that right). The most brilliantly innovative folks in our culture, artists have the capacity to re-imagine our worlds. But our creative silos keep artistic re-imaginings separate from most of our neighbors’ daily lives and lived politics, to our shared detriment.

I would go further: There is something materially significant about a creative practice, unparalleled in how it can reach other folks in unexpected ways. Sharing your work—allowing people who are not artists or curators or critics or gallerists or art historians or even art enthusiasts to touch what you make, to hear it, to smell it, to get uncomfortable with it—that can have the same effect as the salsa-sharing. What I mean is: sometimes experiences of touch and taste, of vision and sound, have more ways of communicating than what our words allow. The things we make can do significant connective work, at a time in which many of us are longing for re-connection. Loaning or gifting a painting to someone, delivering food, playing music: the arts are a way of making contact across metaphorical (hell, even literal) cinder block walls. I won’t be able to take apart my neighbor’s wall.

It truly feels too late for us to re-build our casual being-alongside-ness. But I do think I’m going to paint that wall, put in raised garden beds, and re-make my emotional response to their defensive gesture. Maybe the world is scaring them, too. I fantasize about building a mini-canon to launch unwanted organic snacks their way, a speaker system to blast my hippie affirmations past their fortress walls, workaround systems of neighboring that disrupt our small-scale war of loneliness.

Being alone in your studio is important. But sharing what you make—beyond your comfortable community of people with similar opinions and experiences—can also be a radical act of wall-breaking toward more inclusive models of peace. It’s a simple thing that we all know. But in practice, it’s really hard.

I’ll work on it if you will.

xxLA

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Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.