Fly Together, Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton is an internationally acclaimed, multimedia installation artist whose large-scale, poetic, immersive works actively engage with the space they inhabit by exploring issues dealing with interconnectedness and sensory engagement.

Birds, the color blue, suspensions, fabric, fragility, ephemerality, and thread recur in Hamilton’s work to evoke questions of space, collective voice, “communities past and labor present,” memory, and imagination. The image on her flag Fly Together is a detail drawn from many ABC books meant for early childhood education. With two songbirds holding cloth between their beaks as two humans would with their hands, Hamilton explores the potential made possible through our own mutual cooperation.

She asks, “using their mouths as we use our hands, perhaps they hold a piece of the sky? A cloth that will protect or warm?” It’s impossible to know, she observes, but “we see that to carry the cloth’s weight, to allow the cloth’s movement, they must hold with gentleness and tenacity. They must work and fly together."