Arts of War on the Web

The Springs Art Gallery, a veteran-friendly space in El Dorado Spring, Missouri, is running an exhibit that commemorates military service and highlights the issue of PTSD. It’s called “I am Vietnam,” and is made up of work created through art therapy by Jon York, a former Marine who did a Vietnam War tour in 1969-70. The exhibit consists of York’s paintings, photographs and poetry that have helped him deal with his PTSD.

“Painting has helped me gain control of my life again and helps me release those demons that controlled my life for so many years,” York said. “As veterans, we face battles every waking hour of the day. Creative therapy allows us to drag these thoughts out of our head, put them down as words, paintings and sculptures. Art can address potential solutions, reconciliation, and the power of the human spirit to overcome oppression and loss. This exhibition is the story of my Vietnam experience in creativity. By these paintings I hope to address the issues veterans face, coming back from war, the increased rates of PTSD in returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the increased rates of suicides.”

The exhibit will opened on November 14 and runs through January 16. For info, call 417-296-3659.

“Veterans of America,” an exhibit of the art work of a variety of veteran-artists, opened August 11 at the nonprofit Springs Art Gallery in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. The show, which will run through October 8, includes the paintings of Helen White (that’s her work, above), who served as a nurse in the Vietnam War, and whose work has been exhibited at the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, among other places.

“The thing is, these artists have trouble finding places to display and sell their work,” White told the Nevada Daily Mail. “Art about war is nothing new; it’s been around for centuries; probably as long as there have been wars, there have been artists whose work had themes relating to war.”

The exhibit, which was supported by VVA Chapter 317 in Kansas City, Mo., contains an eclectic collection. “Many different media have been introduced, from paintings, vases, fiber art, books, slide shows, maps and woodwork,” said Ruth Cannady, the gallery’s coordinator. “The Springs Gallery has had a large amount of interest in the exhibition.”

The organizers of “Salute,” a 4th of July art exhibit in Chicago’s historic Flat Iron Arts Building in the Wicker Park area, are looking for veteran artists. The event is billed as “The art show that celebrates patriotism, embodies the American experience and appreciates military personnel.”

The show is sponsored by The Flatiron Artist’s Association, a private, not-for-profit company dedicated to the promotion of the arts in the Wicker Park/Bucktown area. For more info, go to their web site.

An exhibit, “Tribute: Expressions of Loss and Remembrance by Vietnam Veterans,” opens at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center in Texas on June 5.  More than two years in the making, the exhibit includes the work of Vietnam veterans from more than a dozen states and all branches of the military and was put together by the National Vietnam War Museum in nearby Mineral Wells, Texas. The Opening reception on June 5, from 6:00- 9:00 p.m., will feature a performance by Air Force veteran and musician Dick Jonas.

The exhibit consists of photographs, artwork and material from the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago created by Vietnam veterans dedicated to those who perished in the war. Participants include former fighter pilots, combat medics, helicopter door gunners, and infantrymen.  Highlights include an ammunition box memorial by the 1/9 (Walking Dead) Marines, artwork by Aurence Hancock (above), Charles Jones, Rick McCarty, evacuation nurse Helen White and multimedia tributes.

During the week before the opening, San Antonio artist and veteran Roberto Sifuentes will create a “Day of the Dead” altar at the Arts Center to honor the 173rd Airborne and others lost in the war.  Observers and participants are welcome to help.  Veterans, friends and family members are invited to send or bring photos or small mementos to be included in Sifuentes installation.

The National Vietnam War Museum project began in 1998 to develop a national venue that would create an atmosphere of learning about the Vietnam War era, and engage people of all ages, nationalities, and political points of view. In 1999, the museum purchased a 12-acre site in Mineral Wells, Texas, some 50 miles west of Fort Worth.

Submissions are now being accepted, through October 15, for “Wounded in Action: An Exhibition of Orthopaedic Advancements in Art,” a juried exhibit that will be held in March 2010 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. The exhibit will commemorate American service personnel who have had orthopaedic injuries as a result of serving our country in war.

The academy, along with the Orthopaedic Research Society, the Orthopaedic Trauma Association, and the Society of Military Orthopaedic Surgeons are co-sponsoring the exhibit. The show also is designed to recognize orthopaedic surgeons who have provided medical care for wounded warriors as well as civilians who have been affected by war.

The exhibit is open to artists in three categories: (1) Military personnel who have sustained orthopaedic or musculoskeletal injuries in any war or family members of any age who have been affected by those injuries; (2) Orthopaedic surgeons who have provided medical care for wounded warriors, either in military or civilian capacities; and (3) Injured civilians or artists of any age whose lives have been affected by war and have been touched in some way by the loss of extremity or other musculoskeletal injuries of war.

To see the flyer calling for entries, go to woundedinactionart.org

For more info, contact:

Sandra R. Gordon, Director, Public Relations
American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons
Phone: (847) 384-4030
E-Mail: gordon@aaos.org

The theme of the big, splashy feature article in the March 17 Washington Post Style section on the new exhibit, “May Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” running through July 12 at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, was the fact that the renowned artist was having her first show in the nation’s capital since 1981. That’s when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was unveiled.

Lin went on to design several other memorials and “monumental landscapes,” and the show is “her attempt to bring indoors” the work “that she has been doing for the past 15 years,” reporter David Montgomery wrote in the article.

Montgomery asked Lin about her famed reticence to speak publicly about The Wall. “She was busy processing the precocious success and controversy,” he said, referring to how young Lin was (a college junior) when she won the nationwide design contest, and the loud criticism of her abstract design from some quarters, “trying to figure out who she was as an artist. And she was working hard at her art–’obsessively,’ she says. Her instinct was, don’t look back, keep creating.”

Lin said she continues to have conflicting feelings about the experience. “It’s not bad memories,” she told Montgomery. “Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a really nice time.”

“I do think I have this big white elephant right here,” she said, pointing to the area of the Memorial. “Like, ‘Oh, God, she did that, it’s so great. You know, this [other] stuff is crap.’ It’s going to happen.”

Lin said she was “desperately trying to move past the Memorial as fast as possible as an artist. I was trying to prove to myself that I could balance out my life in a different way. After the Vietnam Memorial, I don’t think you can prove it to the world to a degree that you would need to, so I’m just not interested.”

It’s “not that I don’t love the Memorial,” she said. “But you do feel it’s like this big galumphing elephant. And I think you move on. And yet, at the same time, it’s a big piece. It will always by my biggest piece and I’m very proud of it.”

She visited the Memorial while in D.C. with her husband and two daughters, something, Lin said, she likes to do at night. “It was really magical,” she said. “In a funny way, the popularity of it is a sign it’s working. But when you’re dealing with intimacy and connection, there’s something when you see it with a lot of people that’s different from when you see it on your own.”

The latest artistic endeavor from Maya Lin, the landscape architect turned sculptor best known as the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall), is “Systematic Landscapes,” an exhibit of new sculptures, drawings and installations. The show opened October 24 and runs until January 18 at the M.H. De Young Museum, in the Hagiwara Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

“Systematic Landscapes” is a traveling exhibit that began at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington in Seattle, and went to venues in San Diego and St. Louis. It is scheduled to go next to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Three large pieces, including “2 x 4 Landscape” (above), are in the show, and all of them allow visitors to interact with the art in different ways. You can walk underneath the hanging sculpture called “Water Line,” for example, and walk through “Blue Lake Pass,” which is made of particle-board and is based on the mountain range in Colorado where Lin maintains a second home.

What follows is a listing Lin’s career artistic achievements, from an article on the exhibit in the San Francisco Chronicle:

1982: Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Washington, D.C.
1988: The Peace Chapel; Juniata College, Pa.
1989: Civil Rights Memorial; Montgomery, Ala.
1993: The Women’s Table; Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
1995: The Wave Field; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.
1999: Langston Hughes Library; Clinton, Tenn.
2000: Confluence Project; installations along the Columbia and Snake
rivers in Washington state
2000: Boundaries (Simon & Schuster)
2000: Time Table, Stanford University, Palo Alto
2003: Chosen as a member of the selection jury of the World Trade Center
Site Memorial Competition
2005: Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters
2005: Elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame

The opening reception for a new show of more than 100 new works by Shepard Fairey (above), who has been called the “godfather of urban art,” will take place on Saturday, September 13 at 7:00 p.m. at the White Walls Gallery in San Francisco. The show, entitled “The Duality of Humanity,” opens that evening, and runs through October 4.

Fairey has taken the name of the show from the antics of Private Joker, the iconoclastic anti-hero of Gustav Hasford’s Vietnam war novel, The Short-timers ,and the movie it spawned, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Several of the pieces in the show are informed by Fairey’s belief that there is a strong parallel between the Vietnam War and the current war in Iraq. That includes a work depicting a child with a gun in his hand and a flower in his hat. Also, the theme of soldiers and weapons bearing peace signs, or peace signs comprised of military effects, runs through many pieces in the show.

The White Walls Gallery is located at 835 Larkin Street. Phone: 415-931-1500.

Here’s the surreal “duality of man” dialogue from Full Metal Jacket, the part of the film that gave Fairey his title, and one of the parts of the movie that shows Joker at his sarcastic best:

Colonel: Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Private Joker: A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel: Where’d you get it?
Joker: I don’t remember, sir.
Colonel: What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker: “Born to Kill,” sir.
Colonel: You write “Born to Kill” on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What’s that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?
Joker: No, sir.
Colonel: You’d better get your head and your ass wired together, or I will take a giant shit on you.
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall before the man.
Joker: I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man, sir.
Colonel: The what?
Joker: The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel: Whose side are you on, son?
Joker: Our side, sir.
Colonel: Don’t you love your country?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Then how about getting with the program? Why don’t you jump on the team and come on in for the big win?
Joker: Yes, sir.
Colonel: Son, all I’ve ever asked of my marines is that they obey my orders as they would the word of God. We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out. It’s a hardball world, son. We’ve gotta keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.
Joker: Aye-aye, sir.

We missed an intriguing exhibit late last year of oil paintings influenced by the Vietnam War by Philadelphia artist Jane Irish. The exhibit, entitled “Paintings for Winning Hearts and Minds,” was on view at Philadelphia’s Locks Gallery last December and January. You can take a virtual look some of the work on line at http://locksgallery.com/exhibit/2007/irish/irish1.html

Irish, who calls herself a “history painter,” comments on the politics of war through her work. Her huge oil paintings are combinations of oddly juxtaposed, peaceful appearing, pastel-shaded vignettes, many of them of lavish interiors, that include often-jarring first-person reflections on war in raised, white-lettered text. That’s why the paintings have titles such as “The Thousand Yard Stare/Room With a Yellow Sofa,” “Thoughts on A Monsoon Morning/Orange Room,” and “Multi-Colored Dining Room/Winning Hearts and Minds.”

The artist was inspired after doing research at the Imaginative Representations of the Vietnam War collection at LaSalle University’s Connelly Library. That unique collection, which has been under the supervision since 1975 of the archivist (and Vietnam veteran) John Baky, contains plays, films, literature, posters and music of the Vietnam War.

Irish found the words for the paintings from the work of a group of top Vietnam War veteran/poets, including Basil Paquet, Jan Barry, David Connolly and W.D. Ehrhart. Ehrhart, a Philadelphia native, will receive the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award at the VVA Leadership Conference on July 19 in Greenville, South Carolina.

Locks Gallery is located at 600 Washington Square South in Philadelphia.