Bill.Gaskins



fences

 

 

August Wilson’s Fences

 

In 2006 I was commissioned by Theatre Intime, a 69 year old, well-endowed student-community theater company of Princeton University to design a poster for the Black Theater Arts Company of Princeton production of August Wilson’s Fences, a play is about a Black American family in the 1950’s.

 

The work of August Wilson has been a touchstone for me as an American artist and citizen. So I jumped
at the opportunity to design a portrait associated with one of his plays. The poster design was based on a portrait I made of the actor playing the role of Gabriel Maxson, one of the characters in the play. Gabriel

was a soldier in the Second World War, where he received a head injury that required a metal plate to be surgically implanted into his head. He often thinks he is not a person, but the angel Gabriel who opens the gates of heaven with his trumpet for Saint Peter on Judgment Day. Wilson's Gabriel was the inspiration for

the portrait I made.