W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine

The exhibition brings together 67 makers from around the world with 132 images, the earliest from 1897 and the most recent from July 2019. There also is a 26-minute documentary film by award-winning director Jeremiah Zagar that accompanies the exhibition. The space is divided into six sections—Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible—with each section anchored by a central photo essay. This photography exhibition was made possible by Wallis Annenberg and the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, California.

W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine explores the various aspects of walls—artistic, social, political, and historical, as well as how there are literal walls or barriers, such as fences or sand berms. From antiquity to today, walls have been central to human history. Societies have built walls to delineate their borders, but the resulting structures define the civilizations on both sides. From east to west, north to south, walls have fortified cities, transformed ink lines on maps into stone, protected communities, and separated families.

On Nov. 9, 2019, the world celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. Most can easily call up images from that exhilarating evening in 1989: young Germans in T-shirts and jeans destroying the concrete dividers with sledgehammers, armed soldiers looking on with stoic reserve, people rushing through holes and rubble to embrace their counterparts on the other side. The world saw the joy of people uniting, and as the end of the 20th century approached, the toppled wall felt like the dawn of a new age of reason.

As the violence of World War II receded into history, it appeared that so, too, was the ancient, simple brutality of dividing people with walls. And yet, the numbers offer a different narrative. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there were 15 border walls around the world, in May 2018, there were nearly 80, according to Elisabeth Vallet, a geography professor at University of Quebec-Montreal. Over one-third of the world’s nation states now define their borders with a barrier.

Learn more at Mintwiki: W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine. Provided by The Mint Museum Library.