DFW Airport: Terry Allen’s Wish

Everyone who passes through DFW Airport’s Terminal D walks under a 30-foot bronze wishbone. The work is titled Wish. Terry Allen created it in 2005. The sculpture measures roughly twenty feet tall by twelve feet wide. It hangs slightly tilted on one side — not quite symmetrical, not quite balanced. That tilt matters. A wishbone breaks unevenly. Somebody gets the long end. Somebody walks away with the wish.

Allen grew up in Lubbock, Texas — flat Panhandle country where the sky is bigger than anything underneath it. He knows something about scale. His public sculptures are never small gestures. At the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos, a bronze crow holds the ashes of Guy Clark at the entrance. At Stubb’s original barbecue site on East Broadway in Lubbock, a life-size portrait of CB Stubblefield welcomes the street. Allen makes things that are hard to ignore.

The Long End of the Wishbone

Wish stands over security gate D30 in Terminal D. DFW Airport commissioned the work in 2005. When you line up for the security check, the wishbone is directly above you. Whether you’re leaving Texas or arriving in it, you pass under the same sculpture. Allen described the work as conveying “the idea of pulling a wishbone and making a wish.” That’s true of every person who has stood in that line. Each one is running through some combination of hope and worry. The wishbone gives that feeling a shape.

Allen is also the songwriter behind Lubbock (On Everything), one of the most celebrated Texas country albums ever recorded. He is in the West Texas Walk of Fame in Lubbock. The wishbone at Terminal D is his most-seen work. Millions of people have passed under it without knowing his name. That’s the kind of artist Allen has always been — present in the room without needing to announce himself.