Meet the Artist: Levi de Jong’s Material Meditation on the American Flag

Levi de Jong’s recent solo exhibition,“Making America” at General Assembly in London, reimagined the American flag, exploring variations of the charged national symbol through tactile abstraction. Working with materials drawn from his upbringing in Iowa’s industrial heartland, he deconstructs the star-spangled banner to expose layers of labor, ideology, and identity. Speaking with Whitewall, de Jong shares how abstraction and materiality help strip away nationalistic noise, inviting viewers to engage with the flag not as propaganda, but as a site of personal and collective reckoning. His work draws on pop culture, religious imagery, and working-class iconography to question what it means to belong in a country shaped by contradiction. The result is a quiet yet forceful meditation on resilience, disillusionment, and the evolving meaning of American identity.

WW: Your recent solo exhibition, Making America, at General Assembly in London, explores deeply personal narratives through the reimagined iconography of the American flag. How did the process of distilling such a potent national symbol into minimal forms help you uncover new meanings in it? 

LEVI DE JONG: It was never my goal to uncover anything specific from the beginning. My process always starts with a question, and that question usually comes through the material. The materials I work with—bitumen, rubber, enamel—are inherently loaded. They carry the weight of utility, labor, and memory. They’re drawn from the spaces that shaped me: places where things were made, fixed, and held together. 

“My process always starts with a question, and that question usually comes through the material,”

Levi de Jong

When I approached the flag, I didn’t set out to critique it or elevate it. I just wanted to depict it honestly, through the lens of those materials. I think I was trying to strip something away, though I didn’t yet know what. That act of reduction, breaking the flag down into stripes, fields, and muted surfaces, became a way of revealing the image rather than defining it. 

In the end, distilling the flag to its essential form allowed me to remove some of its prescribed narratives. By reducing it, and in some ways rebuilding it, the work found new life. It began to breathe. That clarity made room for reflection, for projection, for viewers to bring their own meanings to it. I think once you take away the noise of nationalism, the symbol becomes human again. 

Tactile Connections and a Powerful Visual Language

WW: Your materials, including silicon, bitumen, enamel, are imbued with memories of your upbringing in Iowa’s heartland. Can you speak to the tactile connection between these materials and your own sense of place? 

LDJ: I grew up around these materials. I remember wandering my grandparents’ farm, stepping over rusted tools in the grass, piles of sheet metal, and old machinery. Most weekends were spent chopping wood, tearing down barns, or building them back up. The materials had a use, a weight, and a cost. That cost was my time and labor, and for a long time, I resented it. 

These materials weren’t symbolic. They were made for industry. When I went on to study in Italy, surrounded by classical techniques and refined materials, I tried to distance myself from that world. I rejected where I came from and what I knew. But eventually, I returned to it with a new perspective. I began to see potential in what had always been there. 

These industrial materials became personal again. I understood how they moved, how they resisted, and how far they could be pushed. My earliest curiosities began there, in the material itself. I know their foundational truths, and now I can rework them, push them further, and use them to depict something more. 

They carry my story and the stories of many others—a story of labor, of making things last, of trying to build a better life. It’s not just about my past, but about a broader American reality. These are the materials of people who work hard to support families, to stay afloat, to hold things together. By giving these materials a new voice, I hope to give a voice to the people behind them—those whose labor has shaped not just landscapes, but the country itself. 

“By giving these materials a new voice, I hope to give a voice to the people behind them,”

Levi de Jong

WW: You draw from a visual language rooted in American iconography, religious symbolism, and pop culture. How do you see abstraction as a means to bridge these different influences? 

LDJ: Abstraction lets me work with familiar symbols without being confined to their fixed meanings. I’m not interested in replicating an image or icon. My focus is to break it down to its most essential form, allowing me to heighten its purest qualities. In doing so, I often discover a new way of seeing. 

Many of these symbols, whether national, religious, or commercial, have always coexisted in the environments I grew up in. American symbolism, religious imagery, and popular culture were never separate categories. Abstraction allows me to hold them together without collapsing them into one. It gives me the room to examine how these systems overlap and what they quietly reinforce. 

I’m not looking for resolution. I’m trying to create just enough friction for something new to come through—something quieter, more honest. This is why I think abstraction is so powerful. It strips away the binary and the trivial. It distills experience to its most essential truth, and in doing so, it reveals a through line that somehow feels truer than true. 

Titles as Talismans and Encouraging New Perspectives

WW: In this new body of work, the titles Valor, Unity, Love, Justice almost function as talismans. How do these guiding principles inform your creative decisions and the overall narrative of that underpins your flags? 

LDJ: There are two smaller flags in the show as well, titled Left and Right, which comically nod to our current political divisions. The rest of the works take on titles like Valor, Unity, Love, and Justice—words that have been used so often in political rhetoric, branding, and ceremony that they’ve started to feel hollow. I grew up hearing these words in church, at school, and during pledges. They were plastered on billboards, repeated in speeches, and absorbed without much question. With this body of work, I wanted to hold those words still for a moment and really look at them. 

These are the kinds of values that were supposedly at the foundation of the country. In God We Trust. One nation under God. We pledge allegiance to this flag. But when you start to look back at history—and at the present—it’s hard not to ask whether those ideals were ever actually meant to be upheld. Whether they were ever truly intended for everyone. It seems not. 

So the titles operate less like statements and more like questions. Can a work still carry the weight of Justice if it’s built from tar, silicon, and staples? What does Unity feel like when the surface is uneven and scarred? I’m not trying to offer answers. I’m letting each word sit on the composition, part framework, part contradiction. 

“I’m letting each word sit on the composition, part framework, part contradiction,”

Levi de Jong

They’re not instructions, and they’re not meant to signal virtue. They act more like pressure points. The viewer can feel their presence, but they have to decide for themselves what still holds meaning. For me, it’s an attempt to reclaim the language—not to restore it, but to test whether it can still hold something real. 

WW: Your practice, which appropriates an inherently nationalist symbol, both challenges established narratives and encourages viewers to look beyond them. Within the context of today’s polarized climate, what do you hope visitors will take away from this exhibition? 

LDJ: The flag is one of the most loaded symbols we have. It’s used to represent pride, protest, identity, fear, and allegiance. Everyone sees it differently, and everyone brings something to it. I’m not interested in telling people how they should feel about it. I’m more interested in slowing it down and flipping it just enough so that people might see it in a new light. 

I’m not trying to erase the flag or reject it. I’m trying to open it up. Through material-based abstraction, I use blue-collar materials to depict these symbols, which carry the weight of labor and infrastructure. For me, they reflect a more grounded version of American life—one shaped by working life, resilience, and contradiction. By reworking the flag through these materials, I’m trying to shift it away from ideology and toward lived experience, to ask what it really means to contribute, to belong, to be part of this country. 

In such a polarized climate, I hope people leave with more questions than conclusions. If the work holds any power, I think it’s in that space between recognition and uncertainty, where a symbol becomes less about what it’s supposed to say and more about what it might still be able to represent.

WW: The American flag has long been both a unifying emblem and a flashpoint for division. How does your work reframe that tension to offer an alternative vision of collective identity? 

LDJ: The flag carries both pride and pain. For some, it represents freedom and opportunity. For others, it stands for exclusion, control, and violence. That contradiction is built into it, and it’s something I try to confront directly in the work. 

“The flag carries both pride and pain,”

Levi de Jong

By rebuilding the flag using blue-collar materials, I hope to introduce a version that feels more reflective of the everyday American person. In a moment when national identity feels fractured, and the core values of the country seem uncertain or selectively applied, we lose our sense of collective strength. We lose the feeling of being in something together. 

These flags are muted, weathered, and pieced back together. But I hope there’s a quiet hopefulness in them—a belief that even through tension and wear, they might still carry something real and speak more honestly to who we actually are. 

The Artist’s Practice, Exhibitions, and Ethos

WW: Having studied sculpture and shoemaking in Florence, and earning your MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London, how has this dual training across two very different contexts shaped the way you approach material and process in your current work? 

LDJ: Studying and living in Florence taught me how to become a draftsman. It gave me a strong foundation in technique and methodology, and taught me how to approach art making through discipline and craft. I was surrounded by classical art and craftsmen, by painters and sculptors deeply rooted in tradition. That environment instilled a sense of rigor and a respect for process. 

After nearly five years in Florence, I moved to New York, where I lived for three years. That’s when I began reconnecting with the industrial materials I grew up around: bitumen, enamel, rubber, industrial aluminum. Materials that once served practical, everyday purposes in my early life but now carried a different kind of weight and potential in the studio. 

Coming to London and studying at the Royal College of Art was another shift. It was more progressive and more critical. I was constantly being pushed, and through that process, my identity as an American artist started to come into focus. Being overseas again, but in a different context, allowed me to look at America with new eyes and, more importantly, to remember my earliest influences and upbringing in the true heartland of the country.

Florence gave me a foundation. New York reconnected me to material. London challenged me to strip everything back and find out what actually mattered. The work I’m making now is an amalgamation of all three: structure and tradition, material honesty, and critical reflection. 

WW: Your work has been exhibited in a wide range of spaces, including holy places. How does the context of the venue influence the resonance of your pieces? 

LDJ: Context matters. Where a piece is shown inevitably changes how it’s read. When my work is shown in a white-cube space, people tend to focus on the formal qualities: the surface, the composition, the materials. But when it’s placed in a space with history or spiritual weight, like a deconsecrated chapel, the work shifts. It becomes quieter, more reflective. The materials carry more symbolism, and the viewer brings a different kind of attention. 

These spaces also carry historical weight. To show work in a revered or institutional setting is to place it into a larger conversation, one shaped by the artists, stories, and values that came before. These places function as cultural archives. They hold memory, belief, and power. Situating low or everyday materials within that context doesn’t just elevate the work; it suggests that the lives and labor they represent are part of that story too. 

It’s a way of saying the divine isn’t out of reach. The kingdom is here, and it exists now. It’s not reserved for a select few—it is available to anyone willing to believe. And maybe, by placing these materials in spaces that have historically felt distant or exclusive, the work can reflect something back to the viewer. Maybe it shows that all along, they have had their place in it too. 

WW: The labor-intensive materials you use, including roofing tar, rubber, and cast aluminum, carry associations of working-class resilience and evoke images of the American heartland. Do you see your practice as a way to honor or elevate those values? 

LDJ: Yes, but not in a romantic way. These materials and images are tied to the world I come from. They carry the weight of labor, effort, and repetition. I use them not to glorify, but to give them visibility. To show that the values they represent belong in the conversation. They’re not secondary; they’re central. 

In a time when working people are being stretched thinner and priced out of their own lives, I think it matters to center that experience. Not as a protest, but as a reminder. These materials, and the lives behind them, deserve to be seen, held, and considered with the same seriousness we give to anything else.

WW: Pop culture and religious iconography often represent polar ends of American life. How do you navigate and reconcile these disparate forces in your work? How do you see the two in dialogue with each other?

LDJ: I don’t see pop culture and religion as polar opposites. I believe we’re all spiritual beings having a physical experience, whether we acknowledge it or not. Pop culture reflects the times we live in, but it also channels deeper undercurrents: longings, fears, and archetypes that have always shaped the human experience. In that way, it’s not so different from religion. It may speak a different language, but it reaches for the same truths.

“I believe we’re all spiritual beings having a physical experience, whether we acknowledge it or not,”

Levi de Jong

When I reference religious iconography or cultural symbols in my work, I’m not drawing lines between them. I’m showing how they coexist and how they interact. We’ve seen this throughout history: Duccio’s Madonna and Child in the 1300s, Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna in the 1500s, Jeff Koons’ Michael Jackson and Bubbles in 1988, and Madonna’s Like a Prayer in 1989. These works, in different ways, use imagery of the divine, the maternal, or the iconic to speak to something beyond the surface.

Even Madonna—just her name—echoes with Catholic meaning. It’s more than branding. It reveals how these sacred references are embedded in our cultural language, even in places we don’t expect.

Is that sacrilegious? I don’t think so. I think it reflects the human need to reach for something bigger. Pop culture doesn’t replace faith, but sometimes it reveals how people are still searching for it, consciously or not. I’m not trying to collapse the sacred into the secular. I’m trying to show that the conversation between them is still alive, still complicated, and still worth paying attention to.

Levi de Jong’s Personal Journey and Future Inquires

WW: This exhibition’s personal narrative traces your journey from Iowa to international art spaces. How have your travels and experiences abroad shaped your perspective on American symbols and values? 

LDJ: Leaving the U.S. helped me see it more clearly. Growing up in Iowa, you’re surrounded by certain values: hard work, faith, patriotism. But you don’t always realize how deeply embedded they are until you leave. It wasn’t until I lived overseas that I really began to question those symbols and what they stood for. 

Being in Europe, especially in places with a long history of art and ideology, gave me the space to look back at where I came from with a more critical eye. The distance allowed me to see American identity as something constructed, not fixed. It became something that could be examined, challenged, and reimagined. I started to understand that the symbols I grew up with, like the flag, carry different meanings for different people depending on where they stand. 

“The distance allowed me to see American identity as something constructed, not fixed,”

Levi de Jong

Traveling also made me more aware of how American culture exports its identity through media, politics, and images. It made me want to look closer at those images and figure out what they’re really saying, and who gets to be included in that narrative. 

WW: Finally, as you conclude this powerful solo show in London, what new questions are emerging for you in your practice? Where do you see this exploration of American symbols taking you next? 

LDJ: This show has made me think more deeply about what the American identity even means, how it’s constructed, who it includes, and what it leaves out. I started with symbols like the flag because they were so present in my life growing up, but now I’m more interested in what happens after the symbol breaks down. What’s left behind? What’s still worth holding on to? 

I think the next phase of my work will look more closely at the people behind the symbols: the figures, the labor, the bodies. I’m interested in how history gets carried, how it lives in material, in gesture, in repetition. I’m still working through what that looks like, but I know it will stay close to the themes of resilience, transformation, and contradiction. I don’t have the full picture yet, but I know the questions are more alive now than ever. And that’s where I want to keep working—from that place of tension, belief, and becoming.