In collaboration with Fringe Projects, Antonia Wright’s public art commission, America Stands Behind Us, is a supersized crowd control barricade. Designed to seize space on street level, the barricade is a technology of social control. The strategic placement of the work in the front plaza of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center, perhaps the most significant hub for civic life in South Florida, responds to the ubiquitous concrete safety barricades surrounding the Brutalist building. By transforming a utilitarian object often used to quell protest or public engagement, the work becomes a kind of a memorial to memorials, a reminder of the constant control of bodies in public space.
Photography by Zachary Bablber, courtesy of Fringe Projects Miami.
