Noguchi spent nearly eight months working on his first public commission, a sculptural frieze composed of cement with added pigment on a 72-foot-wide wall at the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market in Mexico City. A mix of figuration and abstraction communicated the tensions of the political moment: the fate of the worker amid rapid industrialization, the rise of fascism and oppression across the globe, and the faint hope offered by scientific progress (here given special topicality by the inclusion of Einstein’s theory of relativity, as explained to Noguchi by his friend Buckminster Fuller by telegram).