It’s just a red hat. But of course, it’s not: the physical object, one’s choice to wear it or not, and the phrase itself are saturated with meaning. What to make of it? No, seriously: what new, unfettered thing can—or should—be salvaged from such fraught baggage?

When Michael Galbreth was offered the cap by a family member “to make art out of it,” he initially declined. The next day, he had an idea for a simple, comic gesture. By unpicking thread, Galbreth unmade the hat’s meaning. Yes, we all know what the hat originally said; the ghost of the phrase lingers in the work. The unraveling is a wry act of destruction, the frayed residue like an Ozymandian pair of legs shouting meaninglessly in the desert. But the unraveling is also the creation of something new: a transformed, open-ended command. What’s left is found poetry, an elegant one-word summary of what we do, as a nation and a species, for good and for ill. All that ever really mattered was the first word. We make. We make, and make, and make. And the world is what we make of it.

Subscribe on Substack

Links:

• On Erasure - Cecily Parks, The Kenyon Review, July/August 2020.

  
  

• Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953. Collection of the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art.

  
  

• Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  
  

• Jenny Holzer Redaction Paintings

  
  

• Austin Kleon newspaper blackout poems

  
  

• Tom Phillips, A Humument (1966-2016)

  
  

• Mary Ruefle, “A Little White Shadow” (2006) via Poetry Foundation

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

Too many emails? To receive a weekly recap instead, please subscribe on my Substack blog. Instructions for turning on the weekly summary can be found here.