Old Glory Wood Works

Old Glory is an American flag made of over 20,000 individual Budweiser caps nailed to a plywood frame. Each cap is individually crimped and punched and nailed and then attached to the structure. What I loved about the project is how iconic it is. You just can't get more American made than a giant American flag that's 10 feet tall and 16 feet wide made out of Budweiser caps. Adding to that what was cool was that the project actually literally traveled from coast to coast, from Hudson, New York to Indio, California to appear at the Stagecoach Festival. When I'making the piece based on recycled material or even from new material, one of my primary considerations as a former poet is that the material speaks to the idea of the piece. It's not just something you make something out of, there needs to be a reason to work in that particular material because it carries a deeper meaning that way. What's interesting about the piece is that you can look at it from different angles. You can be very enthusiastic, America n Bottle caps have a long tradition in folk art, but generally they're applied more as a texture. I believe one of the first artists to actually do pictorial mosaics in bottle caps. The first piece I did was a mermaid and it was inspired by Haitian flags made out of sequins. I was trying to replicate that in a different take and so the top half of the mosaic was glass mosaic and there was carved wood, there was copper border around it and then the tail was all done in bottle caps. And that's what you look for in a mosaic is that perfect arc all the way across the page so to speak, all made out of teeny, teeny, teeny bits of stuff arranged in a line. So when 28,000 caps arrived at my house in three boxes, I had the red regular Budweiser, the metallic blue Bud Light and the sort of grayish colored Bud Platin You don't know how the colors are going to interact once you've got thousands of caps and it turned out that the gray was perfect because it gave it a very aged and patinaed and classic look. It had way more historical persona which was beautiful. It was less in your face that way, it was a lot gentler of an image which I think can be important with something The nails used to attach the caps to the plywood are just three quarter inch weather stripping nails, they're very thin and they won't go through the cap. So not only is every cap nailed individually onto the flag but first every single cap has to have a hole punched in it with a bigger nail and a hammer. I did some napkin math and my conservative guess is that I swung a tack hammer somewhere between 300 and 400,000 times just to make this one piece. What I love about working with bottle caps specifically is that when you see one or two or a handful of them, they're not all that impressive but when you combine hundreds or thousands of them, the interaction between the base color of the cap and the logo creates a really interesting unexpected shine. The choice of the American flag was in part considering the audience at a country music festival that's obviously going to be appealing to the audience and if you do a google search for American flag and stagecoach you'll come up with 20 pages of people in flag related clothing. When you're making something for an audience you want to delight them and this definitely did that. People were lined up all day long every day of the festival to take photos in front of this flag and it was actually really neat because one group of people would go up, they would hand their phone to the next person in line who would shoot them and then they would trade places and then going up and touching it and getting close to it and they would walk past it and then kind of double-tape when they realized what it was made of and that's when they'd get really enthusiastic because I don'think anyone had any clue how much work went into this thing really. There's no reason they should but they had a sense of it. You could see that they were just really impressed by the level of craftsmanship and how clean the design looked from a distance and up close. In any piece that I do I always It's just levels and levels of repeating that idea and iterating it to enrich the final object and give it a meaning that people can really take home.