Beauty, Justice, and Fences

This article was contributed by Kelly Foster in the spring issue of The Magazine of Gordon College.

One evening last summer, I found myself removing the remains of someone’s old fence from the back of a truck headed to the dump. As I pried the pickets loose from their panels and extracted the rusty nails, I mentally sketched ideas for how to repurpose the materials for an art installation in the gallery of Gordon’s Barrington Center for the Arts.

During the period of time in which I was designing and building the installation, I also gave presentations and published an essay on the tension between beauty and justice. Forming half-decayed cedar fence pickets into art provided an interesting contrast to the process of assembling words about the abstract concepts of beauty and justice. 

Along the way, as I engaged with a variety of people, I discovered that it’s only for some that beauty and justice are merely categories to be mulled over on occasion. For others, the tension is not abstract. It presents real challenges and frustrations in their daily lives and work.

Ministry leaders who want to guide their communities into care for “the least of these”—our neighbors whose lives are characterized by injustice—wonder if it’s wasteful to put resources toward the aesthetic quality of the music, the liturgy, and the spaces in which their communities worship. And they want to affirm and support the artists in their midst, who themselves worry that their gifts for artmaking may not be valuable enough to warrant much of their time and energy in a world marked by injustice.

These tensions arise when we imagine both beauty and justice as elsewhere, separate from each other and separate from our everyday lives. We imagine seeking beauty in places like galleries, concert halls, or nature preserves, whereas pursuing justice might take us to other parts of town or other parts of the world. Yet biblical beauty and justice are not distant, and they are not separate from our lives.

Each word describes characteristics of our relationships with each other and with the world around us. Justice is a set-rightness in our life together, with those far away and those nearby sharing the world in a way that values and lifts up everyone. Beauty is a personal experience of the resonance of things in both our physical and our interpersonal environments. We do not choose if we want to pursue beauty and justice, we are always participating in them, either building them up or breaking them down.

All this was on my mind as I sanded, painted, and reassembled discarded lumber into something new. The installation was, at least in part, about the tension between beauty and justice. I created a set of woven, fence like structures that divided the gallery into an interlocking set of “rooms.” Attendees were encouraged to direct their attention toward one another as they inhabited the spaces in contrast to the more common practice in galleries of directing our attention to art objects. 

My hope was that as people inhabited the spaces together, they might begin to notice how their physical posture and position in relation to one another connects more broadly to other spaces and to other people. The fence pickets formed a screen that both divided and connected the spaces, creating an image of an integrated life, one where beauty and justice are things to seek in and through our interactions with one another. It’s an image of the church, God’s people, seeking a shared life of self-giving love, expanding outward toward neighbors, weaving together discarded lives into something new and beautiful.

Kelly W. Foster, M.Arch., is an associate professor of art. He teaches art design principles and an array of design fields. His research connects design thought and practice with Christian theology.