CAP

Everywhere but their heads. Our fourth episode follows the travels of a cap that won't stay put.

The expert guest for “CAP” was Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Paul Ramírez Jonas is an artist in the public realm and Professor and Art Department Chair, at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. Paul Ramírez Jonas was born in Pomona, California in 1965 and raised in Honduras. Educated at Brown University (BA, 1987) and Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1989), Ramírez Jonas currently lives and works in Ithaca NY.

Over the last thirty years Ramírez Jonas has created works that range from large-scale public installations and monumental sculptures to intimate drawings, performances and videos. Through his practice he seeks to challenge the definitions of art and the public and to engineer active audience participation and exchange. His 2010 Creative Time project, Key to the City, for example, involved 20,000 participants and centered around a key as a vehicle for exploring social contracts pertaining to trust, access, and belonging. His most recent project, a large-scale participatory monument, was installed in the National Mall in Washington DC in the summer of 2023. Public Trust (2016) continues to show every year.

For more on Ramirez Jonas and his work

“Key to the City” project

“Let Freedom Ring” monument

For more on the cap:

Cap, French, c. 1790, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Related objects of interest:

Sons of Liberty bowl, Paul Revere, Jr., 1768, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

William Hogarth, Portrait of John Wilkes (print), 1768, The British Museum

Thomas Crawford, Statue of Freedom, Dome of the US Capitol, 1863

Further reading:

Did you guess which six states have liberty caps on their seals?

Mystery solved: the six states are Arkansas, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and West Virginia. Bonus points: the Liberty Cap is also on the state flags of Idaho, New Jersey, New York, and West Virginia.

For more about this episode, guests, further readings and previews of upcoming episodes - please visit us at https://www.thing4thingspodcast.com/cap-episode

Performance of Jopseph Haydn's Hob III:36 performed and recorded by Gregor Quendel. https://ko-fi.com/gregorquendel