Theaster Gates’ Strata in Cedar is a powerful monument that embraces the hybridity of cultural signifiers, combining a reverence for history with keen art historical formal references. The work is constructed from a decommissioned fire hose, cut into strips and arranged vertically on a cedar wood frame. It relates to Gates’s Civil Rights Tapestries and a wider body of abstract pictures made from the same fire hoses, similar to those used as water cannons against civil rights demonstrators during the 1963 riots in Birmingham, Alabama. The cedar wood is also repurposed, perhaps from the derelict buildings or shuttered African American businesses Gates often works with in his native Chicago. These materials are characteristic of the artist’s oeuvre, probing the poetics of salvaged and repurposed materials and the historical and political resonances implicit within them.
“Art and protest are forms of political thought.They are both potent and make apparent the deep inequities, injustices and truths of our time…There has to be a belief that artistic power lives amongst all people, and there needs to be a willingness to invest in those that seek out that artistic prowess in every form, from every underrepresented community, and amplify it on the walls of cultural institutions throughout the world.”
The grid-like composition places Strata in Cedar in dialogue with American abstract painting of the 1960s, while the materials draw it towards the language of the readymade. Gates negotiates these references within a loaded conceptual and material framework, as Lisa Yun Lee writes: “a signature of Gates's works is his ability to embrace the hybridity of cultural signifiers, thereby ensuring that no single set of meanings is exhausted. He moves between the powerful historical referent that is often part of the weightiness of black history, and a formal reference that is more often than not part of a mostly white art history. Through this interchange, the two become inextricably braided, complicit with one another” (Carol Becker, Lisa Yun Lee and Achim Borchardt-Hume, Theaster Gates, London 2015, p. 56).