David Datuna, “Portrait of America”

In honor of MLK Day: Artist David Datuna‘s “Portrait of America” The work is a large collage is layered over with different optical lenses – a gigantic, 12-foot-long American flag, covered with portraits of American luminaries from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Steve Jobs. As the entire piece is covered with eyeglass lenses of different prescriptions, it either magnifies or distorts the images, depending on how you look at them. 

Datuna used about 2,000 lenses to build his work.

Before he became an artist, David Datuna made his living working in an eyeglass store.
Learning to fit people with glasses, in many ways, was a lot like making art, he says. Every day, he saw how people viewed the same object through different lenses, colors, shapes and frames. In some sense, he could alter the way people saw the world.

‘Portrait of America’, the seminal work of David Datuna’s “Viewpoint of Billions” series, is the first public installation and artwork in the world to utilize Google Glass. The vision of an artist whose story is akin to the American dream, Portrait of America chronicles the journey of a diverse and great nation through a new visual language.