CHICAGO — What could a US Army veteran, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, an African-American Chicagoan and an Iraqi refugee have in common?
Each has been marked by the legacy of the longest military conflicts in US history: the Native American Wars and the Global War on Terror. And from that experience, each has created art, examples of which are currently featured in the second Veterans Art Triennial, exhibited alongside the work of dozens of other artists – some veterans, some from from war-affected communities, some both.
Like any truly large and ambitious exhibition of contemporary art – which it certainly is – Surviving the Long Wars: Triennial and Summit of Veteran Art 2023 is packed with fantastical sculptures, videos, paintings, photographs and installations, sensitively exhibited in evocative settings and historic locations. Of the hundreds of biennials, etc., that have proliferated around the world, however, it is unique in that it is devoted not to art in general, or even thematized by a star curator, but to art. made of war by those involved. In its commitment to the most critical and advanced forms of art practice, and to affected populations that extend beyond the military, the Triennale stands apart from veteran art programs such as those run by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. And it’s at home in Chicago, alongside the National Veterans Art Museum and the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, along with a slate of recurring events like the MdW Fair, a gathering of artist-run projects from all over. the Midwest; the Barely Fair, an international 1:12 scale art fair; and the Chicago Architecture Biennale, which becomes more local and experimental with each iteration.
In the three halls of the Triennial of Veteran Art — Residues and rebellions at the Newberry Library, Count and reimagine at the Chicago Cultural Center, and Unlikely entanglements at the Hyde Park Art Center — the variety of cultural traditions represented is unmistakable. Mahwish Chishty, trained in miniature painting, depicts a series of MQ-9 Reapers, the armed drones that terrorized civilians living along the Afghan-Pakistani border, making them visible with decorations in the flamboyant art style Pakistani trucks. Ledger art, a practice of many Plains Indigenous communities in which events are illustrated on the used pages of settler account books, abounds: Terran Last Gun (Piikani) traces the harsh geometries of Blackfoot tipi designs and Air Force vet Dwayne Wilcox (Oglala Lakota) illustrates comedic scenes of scathing political commentary. A handful of artists update centuries-old textile craftsmanship: Army, Navy and Marine veteran Miridith Campbell (Kiowa) adorns a U.S. cavalry coat with buckskin fringe and epaulets beaded; Melissa Doud (Ojibwe) adds spent bullet casings to her old army uniform, turning it into a jingle dress; Dorothy I. Burge paints a portrait of U.S. Army Colonel Charles Young, who in 1889 became West Point’s third African-American graduate; Sabba Elahi embroiders tondos through her young son’s fisheye lens as a target for domestic surveillance of brown and Muslim bodies. There are even classic oil paintings by Bassim Al Shaker, whose canvases are as lush and moody as a Turner seascape, and even more nightmarish in their depiction of the sky seen overhead during bombings the artist survived when he was a student in Baghdad.
Explicitly contemporary practices like assemblage and conceptualism are also represented. Marine Corps vet Jose deVere fashions limbs, weapons and a life-size horse from leftover furniture, discarded parachutes, old tarps and other detritus, barely holding it together with screws and string and his own creative will. Ali Eyal refuses to tell the exact story of what happened to him and his family when war came to their Iraqi village, instead presenting two walls, fragmented drawings and a set of clues about the horrors they experienced and the imaginative survival tactics.
This cultural heterogeneity should come as no surprise, given the extent of the U.S. military’s incursions abroad and at home, as well as the diversity of its own ranks, where Native Americans served long before gaining citizenship. ; African Americans fought on, despite slavery, discrimination and segregation; and foreigners have always been able to enlist, often as a route to US citizenship. Much more salient is how the tools of colonizer, occupier, and oppressor can be used to resist and persist, and how this recuperation adapts to hybrid identities. The art of the register has always done this, but registers are not the only bureaucratic form open to appropriation. Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh are building an archive room of declassified documents and press clippings related to the Global War on Terror, part searchable and part impenetrable, with simultaneous translation streamed in Arabic and Dari. Four metal road signs from Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation) offer a deadpan commemoration of the US government’s forced removal of 100,000 people from their ancestral lands during the Trail of Tears. There are also other memorials here, like the makeshift ones that Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) has been documenting since 1999, honoring tribal veterans at the Memorial Day Powwow in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Most feature an American flag folded into a triangle, a tobacco shape, and a photograph of the dead.
Portraits are crucial: to have a face is to be known and remembered, even imperfectly, and the artists oblige, especially in the face of government destruction. Ganesh paints sweet watercolors of detained and missing people in the months after 9/11. Hanaa Malallah painstakingly recreates, from burnt scraps of canvas, the missing images of Iraqi civilians killed in the dawn bombardment of their neighborhood shelter by an American smart bomb. Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage, Lakota) draws a grid of Native warriors dressed in ghost dancing insignia, boldly posed on a collage of U.S. cavalry recruit forms, traditional graphics, maps and war planes bearing appropriate tribal names. The other side of the coin is also true: Monotypes of Anonymous Native Americans by Marine Corps veteran Monty Little (Diné) are smudged, layered and cut beyond readability, acknowledging the brutality and complexity of their history while by refusing the spectacular. A pair of life-size self-portraits by Army vet Gina Herrera (Tesuque Pueblo), with their mismatched metal dummy and legs, splintered upper halves, and color-wrapped appendages bear witness to war-damaged bodies, maintained together by a fierce personal, can-do, and cultural spirit.
Whatever side of the conflict they found themselves in and however they managed to navigate it, each artist in this exhibition understands that art remains unparalleled in helping us all fight against the most horrific and the most enduring of human activities: war.
Surviving the Long Wars: Triennial and Summit of Veteran Art 2023 continue with Residues and rebellions at the Newberry Library (60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois) through May 26; Calculate and reimagine at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois) through June 4; And Unlikely entanglements To the Hyde Park Art Center (5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) until July 9. The exhibition was curated by a team including Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Joseph Lefthand, Amber Zora and Meranda Roberts.
Full disclosure: The writer’s husband, artist Michael Rakowitz, has works included in the exhibit and is not discussed here.
