This Saturday, I’ll be showing new work in Unfurling 250, a group exhibition opening June 13, 2026 at James Oliver Gallery in Philadelphia: Simone Biles / Ghost Flag over the Capitol.
As Philadelphia marks the nation’s 250th anniversary, Unfurling 250 brings together 19 artists to explore America not as a fixed idea, but as a lived and evolving reality. The exhibition spans photography, video, sculpture, textile and other forms, offering something more complex than celebration or critique. It offers a record.
My piece brings two American images into confrontation with each other.
One is Simone Biles, a living figure of American excellence. A Black American woman. An Olympic athlete. A body in command of gravity, pressure, discipline and history.
The other is the Statue of Freedom above the U.S. Capitol, one of the most visible national symbols in the country and one of the least examined. It sits high above Washington as if its meaning is fixed, but the history underneath it is anything but simple.
Designed by Thomas Crawford and placed atop the Capitol dome in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, the statue was meant to embody American freedom. But even before it reached the dome, freedom had already been edited.
Crawford’s early design included a liberty cap, a symbol historically associated with emancipation and formerly enslaved people. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War and later president of the Confederacy, objected to that reference. The cap was removed and replaced with a helmet, eagle and feathers.
That substitution is not a minor design note. It is the politics of the image.
A monument to freedom was altered because its symbolism came too close to the reality of slavery. It was safer, politically, to turn freedom into something abstract, militarized and mythological than to let it visibly suggest emancipation.
Then there is the deeper irony: the statue was completed with the crucial labor and skill of Philip Reid, an enslaved Black man who helped solve the casting and assembly of the plaster model. The nation placed Freedom above the Capitol while still denying freedom to the people who helped make the symbol possible.
That contradiction is not buried in the past. It is still active.
The statue is also frequently misread as Indigenous or Native American because of the feathers and eagle forms in the helmet. That misreading interests me because it reveals another American habit: taking symbols, identities and histories, combining them into a national image, then asking the public not to look too closely at what has been absorbed, erased or renamed.
The “ghost flag” in this work is not meant to be a clean patriotic gesture. It is a projection. A veil. A haunting. It moves across the Capitol as something both present and unstable, familiar and untrustworthy.
On one side of the diptych, the flag appears as a luminous, almost spectral outline hovering over the Capitol dome, its glow both reverent and questioning, caught on the sculpture. On the other, Simone Biles meets the viewer with clarity and confidence.
I am interested in the flag not as a settled emblem, but as a question.
What does freedom mean when the symbol itself has been compromised? What does patriotism mean when history has been edited? What does a monument represent when the body of the nation tells a different story?
This is where Simone Biles enters the work.
She is not an allegory. She is not bronze. She was not commissioned to represent an idea. She is real, contemporary and self-possessed. She is a living monument to excellence, but also to pressure, refusal, vulnerability and control.
Putting her image beside the Capitol is not about making a simple patriotic statement. It is about contrast.
The Capitol offers an inherited symbol of freedom, shaped by political compromise and racial contradiction. Simone offers a contemporary embodiment of American greatness that cannot be abstracted, softened or hidden inside mythology.
One image says what America wanted freedom to look like. The other shows what American excellence actually looks like.
For me, the work is about the space between national myth and lived truth. It is about the symbols we inherit and the people who overcome them. It is about the uncomfortable fact that freedom in America has always been both an ideal and a battleground.
Through my work at D’Amico Studios, and through years of working across photography, portraiture, projection mapping and large-scale experiential projects, I have always been interested in what images can hold, what they can reveal and what they can force us to look at again.
The ghost flag is not there to decorate the Capitol. It is there to represent a haunting of history. As his story questions it, are we destined to repeat history. And Simone Biles stands beside it as something the monument can never be, a symbol of humanity and its ability to overcome, be undeniably alive, and free on her own terms.
Unfurling 250 opens June 13, 2026 at James Oliver Gallery and runs through August 22, 2026.
