Exhibition co-organizer Aaron Hughes, and artists Rodney Ewing, Eric Perez and June Carpenter will discuss the themes that inspired this year’s Veteran Art Triennial exhibition, SURVIVING THE LONG WARS: Unlikely Entanglements. The group will also address the parallels and connections between the artworks on view and the civilians and BIPOC military veterans impacted by these long wars.

Schedule

Tour: 6:30 – 7:15pm

Talk: 7:15 -8pm

Register for the event here. 

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Aaron Hughes

Aaron Hughes (he/him) is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes develops projects that deconstruct militarism and related institutions of dehumanization. Hughes works with a range of art and activist projects including Justseeds Artists Cooperative, Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and emerging Veteran Art Movement.

About Rodney Ewing:

Rodney Ewing is a Brooklyn, NY based visual artist. Ewing’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and events. With his work he is pursuing a narrative that requires us to be present and profound. His work has been exhibited at Jack Shainman: The School, Kinderhook NY, The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The Drawing Center, New York, NY; and in San Francisco, CA at Jack Fischer Gallery, Nancy Toomey Fine Art, Euqinom Gallery, and most recently at Rena Bransten Gallery where his represented.. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at Space Program SF, Recology and the De Young Museum of Fine Arts both in San Francisco, as well as Djerassi in Woodside, California, Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California, Bemis Center for the Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, NARS, Brooklyn, New York, and Fountainhead, Miami, Florida. Ewing received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University and his MFA in Printmaking West Virginia University.

About June Carpenter:

June Carpenter is an Osage Nation tribal member and a self-taught, mixed-media artist who was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She addresses systemic injustices against Indigenous Peoples and explores connections to community and nature through artwork, primarily consisting of embroidery, beadwork, and hand-cut paper. Carpenter earned a Bachelor of Science from Tulane University, and a Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts from the University of Oklahoma. She has worked as a NAGPRA Assistant for the Osage Nation and in museums as a Collections Manager and Registrar. Now based in Chicago, she works as a Repatriation Specialist at the Field Museum. Through her artwork and museum work, she seeks to meaningfully represent and honor Indigenous Peoples and to create work that is relevant, informative, and healing.

Eric Perez

Eric Perez (he/him) is a first-generation American, United States Marine Corps veteran, artist, and educator in the city of Chicago. Primarily a photographer, his work focuses on the impacts and experience of being a Marine during his two deployments as part of the Global War on Terror. Digging into hard-drives containing images taken during his service, Perez embeds typed histories into digital image code which the computer renders as glitched images. He views these colorful error patterns as stand-ins for his platoonmates, experiences, fears, and traumas which he then transposes onto other forms of media. Perez earned his Associates in Art at Triton College in 2016 and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Bachelors in Fine Art in 2019. Soon after, he was recruited to join the Floating Museum, an art collective that deployed him across the city installing and documenting their various public art projects. His role at the organization grew and he currently serves as Project Manager. In 2022, he was selected to be a National Endowment for the Humanities Veteran Fellow as part of the Emerging Veterans Art Movement. His work has been shown in UIC’s 2019 BFA thesis show, Triton. Perez is in an artist in residence at Hyde Park Art Center and the annual recipient of the annual David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation award which makes his residency possible.

This event is in conjunction with Expo Chicago’s South Side Institution Night.