For artist, a banner year

Marie-Luise Wulf spent much of 2004 bicycling around Cambridge and Somerville, looking for houses where an American flag was displayed.

They caught her eye, Wulf said at the time, because people in her native Germany rarely display the national flag at their houses -- something, she said, that changed for a while during the 2006 World Cup soccer matches.

In all, Wulf conducted, and videotaped, some 40 interviews with the owners of those flags. Back in Germany, she spent much of the past 18 months arranging the photographs and videotapes for an exhibit at the German-American Institute in Heidelberg.

"For me," Wulf said, "the exhibit was like a mosaic, the photographs outside, then the interviews with the people inside their houses."

That exhibit recently concluded after a well-attended month long run -- which featured an appearance by American ambassador William R. Timken Jr., who was visiting the institute on the occasion of its 60th anniversary.

Wulf returned to Cambridge recently to obtain releases from local people she had interviewed, looking toward a possible exhibit in the United States.

Wulf said most of the subjects "liked what I had picked out from the original interviews" -- some of which ran over an hour -- for a 70-minute video loop that plays continuously on a monitor screen during the exhibit.

Many of the people who visited the exhibit in Heidelberg, Wulf said, "found it interesting to see the environment here, to see where people lived, and then to look inside their homes."

Among the voices they heard was a woman who said she was following a tradition started by her mother some 50 or 60 years ago; a man who "went scurrying for a flag" when he saw neighbors putting out their flags after 9/11; and a man who said he put up a flag pole in his yard because he wanted people to see the flag. "In this beautiful sunlight," he told Wulf, "the colors are just absolutely beautiful."