Arts of War on the Web

Last week the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced a national call for photographs of the more than 58,000 men and women whose names are on The Wall in Washington. The photos will be featured in a high-tech display in the proposed $85 million underground Education Center that is planned nearby.

In an event held at the Newseum in Washington, former Nebraska Sen. (and Vietnam veteran) Chuck Hagel and Peter Holt, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs (and a Vietnam veteran and the chair of the Campaign to Build the Education Center), joined VVMF head Jan Scruggs to kick off the endeavor, which has had a jump start with the thousands of photos that the the Fund has collected that appear on its “Virtual Wall” web site on the Internet.

“We’ve got 10,000 already,” Scruggs told The Washington Post. “By the time we get this built, we’ll have 80 to 85 percent of them. And then, within 10 days, we’ll have the rest.”

For info on how to submit a photo, go to the VVMF web page.

John Brennan, who served as a Flight Operations Coordinator, with the 114th Aviation Helicopter Company in Vinh Long in 1970-71, is collecting names that in-country Army helicopter crews painted on their aircraft from 1961-73 for a book he is putting together.

“I have cataloged over 2,550 names to date,” Brennan told us. “I expect that number to exceed 3,000 when complete, and would very much like to include as many personalized copter names as possible. The second part of this book project is a photo collection of helicopter nose art that includes names, artwork, graffiti—everything and anything that was painted officially and unofficially on in-country Army copters.”

If you’d like to help, email the name info and/or scanned nose art pictures to johnmailman@yahoo.com

On Friday, May 22, the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, will present a screening of the documentary, Muse of Fire, a film by Lawrence Bridges that looks at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming project, which brings together some of the nations top writers (many of whom are Vietnam veterans) and aspiring young veteran writers. Jon Peede, NEA’s Director of Literature Grants Programs and a driving force behind Operation Homecoming, will introduce the film. He will lead a roundtable Q&A after the showing with the poet E. Ethelbert Miller, workshop instructor James Mathews, and one or two workshop participants. The Writer’s Center is located at 4508 Walsh Street in downtown Bethesda. The event is free and open to the public. To register, go to the center’s website. Muse of Fire includes readings and interviews with U.S. troops and their families, along with commentary from a slew of authors and actors who took part in the program. That includes Dana Gioia, Mark Bowden, Ray bradbury, Jeff Shaara, and Andrew Carroll. The original Operation Homecoming workshop participants included Vietnam veteran writers Tobias Wolff, Joe Haldeman, and Richard Currey.

The first and only museum dedicated to U.S. Army Infantrymen, aptly named the National Infantry Museum, is set to open in March on a 200-acre site adjacent to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. The museum will immerse visitors into the life of infantrymen in all of the nation’s wars. It will feature several themed galleries filled with artifacts and interactive exhibits, along with a 300-seat IMAX Theater.

For more info, go to www.nationalinfantrymuseum.com

For a video preview, go to http://www.nationalinfantryfoundation.org/home.shtml

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

On Thursday, October 2nd, after a two-year refurbishment project, the aircraft carrier Intrepid returned to its former berth, at Pier 86 off West 46th Street in New York City’s Hudson River.

The sixty-five-year-old aircraft carrier, which saw service in World War II and did three tours of duty in the Vietnam War, had been at Pier 86 for twenty-five years before leaving in 2006 for Staten Island so that the pier could be rebuilt and the ship overhauled.

The new Intrepid Museum is scheduled to reopen on November 8, and hold a grand opening celebration on Veterans Day, November 11. On tap will be a series of interactive exhibits and a wide array of virtual, multi-sensory technology. The museum will feature 30 restored aircraft, the former USS Growler submarine and a supersonic Concorde.

“Semper Fidelis: How I Met My Father” is the title of a new mixed-media fine art exhibition that will be on view from May 23 (Memorial Day) to July 7 at the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which is located right off I-95 south of Quantico, Virginia. The exhibition is a combination of Hubbard’s work in ceramics, photography, and graphic design. It includes USMC reports, letters written by Hubbard’s Marine Corps Vietnam veteran father, and archival photos of Hubbard, senior, who was killed in Vietnam was his son was just two years old.

For more info, go to the museum’s website, http://www.usmcmuseum.org/index.asp
Click here for a virtual look at Tom Hubbard’s work.

On Thursday, April 4, a week before its official opening, Washington, D.C.’s newest museum, the Newseum, held a solemn ceremony honoring four journalists who were killed in a 1971 helicopter crash in Laos. The memorial service, which drew a large crowd of former Vietnam War journalists, commemorated the dedication of the final resting place in the museum of the remains of Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Kent Potter, and Keisaburo Shimamoto. Their remains were found at the site in 1998.

The fragmentary remains are housed in a stainless-steel box that sits beneath a metal plaque set in the floor of the Newseum’s memorial gallery. Above it is a glass wall containing the names of 1,843 journalists who have died covering wars since 1837.

The Newseum is on 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue just off the National Mall, across the street from the National Gallery of Art.

To read the excellent article on the memorial service in The Washington Post, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/03/AR2008040302351.html?hpid=sec-metro