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Be Discovered!

It's Weird Contest Week in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Ocean City's weird contests include artistic pie eating, saltwater taffy sculpting, french fry sculpting, and animal and celebrity impersonations. Why not sculpt your own work from found objects and head out to the shore? Today's artwork is a great example of what you can do with everyday materials!

The common bottlecap or "crown cap," as it is properly known, was perfected in 1891 and has remained essentially unchanged. When bottles were sold from iceboxes and the earliest mechanical coin-operated dispensers, only the cap end was visible to the purchaser. Most of the earliest bottles designed to be sold with "crown caps" had no labels on the glass, relying instead on the small area of the cap to carry the logo and advertising message of the product.

As soon as glass bottles appeared on the market with these cork-lined, metal caps, artists began to find uses for the nonreturnable, nonrefundable caps as raw material for craft and art projects. Artists made solid but flexible "ropes" from these caps by punching a hole in the middle of each and stringing them onto heavy wire.

The maker of this lion wrapped its body with bottlecap ropes to give the animal a ribbed look. Other found objects used on the lion include "flashcubes" for eyes, and old plastic wheels from a child's toy. The lion's mouth is rigged to open and close by pulling a wire.

Source: Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).

Pictured: Unidentified artist, Bottlecap Lion, Completed after 1966, carved and painted assemblage, bottlecaps, flashcube, fiberboard, and plastic, 29 1/4 x 49 1/2 x 15 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum,Gift of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.