Text by AJ Garrett, MIMA Audience Development Assistant
Theaster Gates
From Every Mountainside, 2013
Decommissioned fire hose and wood
144 x 232 cm
From Every Mountainside is a bold abstract piece, its red, white and blue stripes, suggestive of a weathered American flag. The title of the work is from the patriotic song My Country Tis of Thee, which was the national anthem for the USA before the Star-Spangled Banner and reinforces this evocation. Get close to the work and you will see that it is constructed from lengths of fire hose. Theaster Gates sourced these hoses from around his hometown of Chicago, repurposing them to make a series of works.
The use of these fire hoses references the 1960s Civil Rights protests when US police and fire departments were ordered to use fire hoses to intimidate and disperse people demonstrating by spraying them with highly pressurised jets of water. Gate writes: “Those potent images are always with me through relatives and friends who were there and others who have publicly remembered this moment in American history. The articulated needs of the Black poor and marginalised rallied thousands from around the country and the entire world turned to this catalytic moment.”
In the 2023 film Creed III, directed by Michael B. Jordan, the title character, an African American boxer, wears a robe designed in collaboration with Gates, made with pieces of fire hoses embedded within and resembling the US flag in the same style as this work. The filmmakers have described this choice as a way to reintroduce the iconography of the flag, with added symbolism of journey and struggle.
