[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thank you all for being here.
Good to see you.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
And my pronouns are she/her/hers.
I'm the director and curator of the Wignall Museum
of Contemporary Art, a teaching museum located
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College.
Thank you for joining us for today's program,
featuring Yvette Pino, presented as part of the Collective Care
series and in collaboration with the Faculty Success Center.
Collective Care is an ongoing collaborative series
of programs developed by the Center
for Culture and Social Justice or CCSJ and the Wignall
Museum of Contemporary Art.
Collective Care programs are often
organized in concert with fellow student service areas
on campus.
Collective Care brings together scholars, activists, artists,
and community experts to explore contemporary issues that
affect Chaffey College students' lives.
So with the Collective Care series,
we hope to foster a sense of belonging, strength
and identities, challenge stigmas, and continue
to commit to being lifelong learners and advocates
for a socially-just world.
Further, today's program is part of a series of programs
presented in honor of Veterans Appreciation
Week at Chaffey College.
A special shout out to veterans who are with us today,
including Yvette.
On behalf of all the areas represented here today,
we thank you for your service.
Next, I'd like to introduce Faculty Success Center
facilitator Cindy Walker, who will share our lab
acknowledgment and share a bit about the short faculty-only
discussion immediately following Yvette's presentation.
Cindy/
Thank you, Becca.
With respect and honor for the lands that we gather on
and the leaders before us, we acknowledge the Gabrielle Union
Tongva peoples, the original stewards
of the sacred and unceded homelands.
The Tongva people's history, languages, cultural traditions,
and legacy continue to shape this region,
and we recognize their continuing presence
in their homelands.
In the spirit of truth and equity,
Chaffey College commits to uplifting
the voices of Indigenous peoples,
building an inclusive and equitable
educational environment, and decolonizing the institution.
We also encourage members of the Chaffey College community
to learn about the land they reside on
and the original caretakers and advocate
for culturally-responsive action.
Briefly here, I will introduce Yvette
but wanted to let you know that she'll be presenting
for about 50 minutes.
And as time allows, we can also do some Q&A.
So if you do have questions, feel free to jot them down.
You can include them in the chat now, and we will get to as many
as we possibly can during that time.
So please, without further ado, allow
me to introduce our esteemed guest, Yvette M. Pino.
Motivated by honest conversations and a belief
that everyone and everything has a story,
Yvette M. Pino harnesses her artistic ability
to interpret these narratives.
While deployed to Iraq in 2003 with the 101st Airborne
Division, she was tasked to paint murals
and was coined the unofficial division artist.
Painting in the field often encourage
discussions between artist and audience
and would fundamentally influence Ms. Pino's creation
of the Veteran Print Project.
Over the last 10 plus years, the Veteran Print Project
has paired more than 100 veterans
with artists to exchange a dialogue that
resulted in an addition of prints
based on the veterans' story.
The artwork has exhibited nationally
and has been recognized by NPR's All Things Considered
and has been licensed by the ABC Studios
for use in television stage sets.
Pino is research artist who served
in the military for over 12 years.
This investigation of veteran as artist
has revealed the impact of that experience
on the artist over its gleaned and extensive record
of veterans, who not only create powerful bodies of work when
returning home but who also built
the foundations of monumental art programs
across the United States and globally.
Yvette M. Pino earned her BFA from the University
of Wisconsin Madison and received a certificate
in museum studies from Northwestern University.
She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Curatorial
Fellow for the 2019 National Veterans Art Museum Triennial
and Veteran Arts Summit.
Pino served on the Madison Arts Commission from 2013 to 2021
and is the curator of veteran art for the Wisconsin Veterans
Museum in Madison, Wisconsin, where she recently
curated artwork with the award-winning, historic
renovation of the Milwaukee Soldiers Home
by the Alexander Company.
So please join me in giving a warm virtual welcome
to Yvette Pino.
Thank you so much, Rebecca, for that.
I'm going to share my screen with you all as
I start this presentation.
So good afternoon.
Thank you, everybody, for being with us today.
And thank you, Rebecca, of course,
for that wonderful introduction and for inviting me
to speak with all of you today.
Thank you, Roman, for the behind-the-scenes
administrative support.
And of course, thank you to Chaffey
for welcoming me to speak with all of you today.
I mentioned in my social media post,
telling everybody about this show,
that I'm grateful for all of these recent projects
that I've had on the West Coast over the last few years.
I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And every time I feel like I'm getting closer and closer
to the West Coast, I have a nostalgia for being home.
So it gets me a little homesick.
So thank you for this invitation.
This new world of digital presentations
opens up new opportunities for artists
to reach a broader audience and for institutions
to welcome visiting artists, like myself,
without the extra financial barriers of travel expenses
and the drama of scheduling conflicts.
So I'm really excited to be a privilege--
I'm really excited to be here as not only a participant,
as a visiting artist in this platform,
but I get to host similar events like this
in the other creative roles that I'm in.
So I appreciate the value of this platform.
Now, today, I know I have a lot of time to talk to you,
but I also just how quickly that time will speed by.
So I'm going dive right in and get started.
As mentioned, my name is Yvette M. Pino.
My pronouns are she/her/hers.
I'm an army veteran, an artist, and a printmaker.
I'm also a curator.
And today, I'm really excited because I'll
be discussing my work on all of those fronts, work
like the Veteran Print Project.
And the Veteran Print Project, in the simplest terms, is this.
A veteran meets an artist, a conversation happens,
a print is made.
We'll be discussing the how to all
of that throughout the artist talk today.
I'll also be able to discuss some of my responsibilities
that I've had working as the Curator of Veteran
Art at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
And last but certainly not least, I'm
going to be able to share elements
of my own personal body of artwork, which is really
exciting because as a curator and with the Veteran Print
Project, I don't always get a chance to do that.
So I get to share some of my own artwork with you today.
So first, a little bit of background.
I was in the United States Army, and I
served with the 101st Airborne Division.
I deployed twice to Iraq, once in '03, '04 and again
in '05, '06.
And I was really lucky because while I was deployed,
I got to paint murals.
Now, there's a much longer story to how
I became the unofficial division artist
and how I painted these murals.
But for the sake of time today, really, what you need to know
is that I served in the Army, and I
got to paint while I was overseas in my deployment.
When I say I painted murals, really, I
was doing these large-scale reproductions
of unit crests or the division patch,
like you see here on these giant helipads.
These are 30-foot by 60-foot helipads into Iraq.
I had to do four of those.
So really, again, what you need to know is I was in the Army,
and I got to paint murals while I was in the Army.
And now, I'm going to get all curatorial with you,
a little graphic designey because I'm going
to use the rule of thirds.
And I'm going to break down how this integral moment in time,
how me painting murals in Iraq was integral
of my future artistic career.
Number one, painting murals in the Army
laid the groundwork for what would become the Veteran Print
Project.
Like I said, you're going to be hearing a lot about this
throughout this talk.
Number two, painting murals in Iraq inspired
my future research, the research I do today,
which is examining the artists in the field, what do we,
artists, do when we are in a military deployment?
And three, painting murals in Iraq
cultivated the innovative techniques
and the mental endurance that I would need as an artist working
with minimal supplies and time.
So how all of this happened is just
important as what it revealed.
I was unaware of it at the time, but most people
who paint or work in the creative sector know.
People just love to watch other people make art, don't they?
They love to watch us and the creative process.
As you can see, in 3, 2, 1, oh, the audience applause.
Yes, we made a print using a steamroller as a giant printing
press because people love to watch the process
and ask questions.
And as artists, whether it comes naturally
or whether we have to adapt, we have
to learn to communicate what we are doing in real time
while people are watching because they're
mesmerized by what we do.
And they want to know more.
They want to know how.
And if you can embrace that, then you
can understand that there's a bigger opportunity
for conversations that are going to occur organically
through that type of interaction.
For example, imagine this, I'm in Kuwait.
You don't really have to imagine too hard
because here's a picture of it.
I'm in Kuwait.
It's somewhere between 100 and 115 degrees.
We, the soldiers, are usually, not in this picture,
but we're usually wearing our full battle rattle, which
means our flak vest, our Kevlar, our MOPP
gear, which is our chemical protection suit, and gas mask.
Remember, it's 2003, we still had
to don our mask when the alarm would sound.
All of that, you can see, is in that little pouch
on the back of my thigh there.
All of that was packed and on our person.
And I'm standing in front of this concrete barrier,
otherwise known as a Jersey barrier,
those things you see on highway road construction.
And I'm attempting to apply paint to this baking block,
well in conversation with two guys I've never met before.
And during this exchange, I learned
who these guys are, what unit were they with,
what was their job, what are their likes, what
are their dislikes, what music do they listen to?
You get the idea, right?
I'm getting to know these guys.
And they're super excited when I tell them, sure,
I'll make these two figures in this painting.
I'll make them you.
I'll personalize it to you.
Just spell your name out on a piece of paper
so that I paint it correctly on this block.
Now, this was not one of my finest piece of artworks.
As you can see in the picture, I did not
use this and submit this in my portfolio for art school.
But what I learned that day is that exchange with those two
guys, I've never forgotten, that they
took a few minutes of their precious times
in the blazing sun to talk to me just days before--
this was literally just a few days
before we cross the border into Iraq to start the war in 2003.
And in my defense of this painting,
I had a half-inch size brush to paint that whole thing.
So-- [CHUCKLES] I just-- the important part of this
is that exchange between me and those guys.
That interaction gave me something
to talk about with everybody else that
would come before me in those next few days
while I was painting that mural.
I was able to tell them who those people were
in that painting.
It wasn't just two random people from a history book.
It wasn't anonymous faces on a wall with military subject
matter.
It was guys that you might be sitting across
from at the chow hall.
It was guys that you were going to be
arm in arm, hand in hand with as we
crossed the border into Iraq.
And that moment also gave those two guys something
to talk about on that last phone call home
that they were able to make before we jumped.
This moment right here is where I
learned about the power of art as a catalyst for conversation.
Now, moments like that happened not just once,
not twice, but every single time I
was able to draw and paint in the army,
which fortunately, for me, was really quite often.
I got to meet a lot of people.
I was a cook in the army, so everybody has to eat.
Between people come in and eat and me painting
murals and people coming to watch me make art,
I learned a lot about the people I was serving with.
And they were learning a lot about me.
And of course, they now knew that I
could draw and paint, right?
So often, I was asked to create a portrait of a fellow soldier
in the field, which I did.
Now, these portraits, I just drew recently.
All those portraits I did in the field,
I gave to the people that asked me to do them,
so I don't have any pictures of that.
But I was able to draw portraits.
And while I was doing that, what I didn't realize then
was that was also guiding me toward the future research
that I would be doing right now.
And that's considering what artists
do while they're in the field.
And unsurprisingly, portrait illustration
goes all the way back through every generation
of military service.
One of the earliest accounts I read about this
was written by Pliny the Elder.
Pliny the Elder was a Roman Naval commander.
He was one of the first art historians,
one of the first military historians.
And I call him one of the first, it's
because his writings have existed and haven't been
destroyed by the test of time.
But he has a conversation in his writing
about the origins of painting.
He started a debate of where painting really came from.
And he tells the story about a girl in Corinth.
She's the daughter of Butades.
And her lover is going off to battle the next day,
and so she creates this silhouette portrait of him
as a keepsake before he heads off to battle.
And her father was a ceramicist, and he
created, from that silhouette, a clay
tile that he put on the roofing tiles that he was making.
And that's kind of that first indicator there,
yellow ribbon, right, something to identify
that this household has somebody that's going off to battle.
And if you're not familiar what light silhouette portrait is,
you can see, we did this for a drink-and-draw event
at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum on Valentine's Day.
I had people come and create silhouettes to remember me by.
But in order to do this, you need a light source.
Often, it would be, back in the day,
it would be a candle or the sunlight.
And you have somebody sitting in profile,
and it projects that profile onto the surface
that you're drawing.
And you outline it, and then you fill it in.
And now, you have this two-dimensional essence
of somebody's profile, or in the case of the girl in Corinth,
her father three dimensionalizes it
by making it into a roofing tile.
What I'm trying to get to-- the point is
that we create these keepsakes, portraits
create these keepsakes.
In World War II, they call them snaps, like snapshots.
Cameras haven't always been available or allowed.
But I think there's a stronger sense to the handmade.
This is from Harold Schmidt.
I curated an exhibit of his in 2019 at the Wisconsin Veterans
Museum.
And he actually was getting commissioned
to create these portraits.
Most of them were-- he would have his soldiers sit and pose
for a portrait, or they would bring him
a little photograph of their loved one,
of their sweetheart that they wanted
him to make a handmade drawing.
And there's nothing against the artistic integrity
of the photograph or the photographer,
but people just seem to be much more--
there's an intimacy behind a hand-drawn, right?
There's a vulnerability to sitting for a portrait.
Cameras haven't always been available either or accessible
or even allowed.
So think about the vulnerability that encourages
and more intimate exchange and connectivity.
Somebody is intentionally staring at you
for a long period of time.
Examining drawings by Wisconsin World War II veteran Santos
Zingale, I started exploring the underlying sentiment
behind the gaze of the subject toward the artist.
How is the person being depicted looking back at you, right?
There's a myriad of storytelling that's
found simply by studying the eyesight and the body language.
And you can start to identify the different levels
of vulnerability.
There's a level of vulnerability in each one of these people
that the artist is depicting.
Sometimes, they're uncomfortable.
They don't like to be stared at.
Sometimes, they're unaware that they're even being drawn.
To unchecked fear, that like far off gaze,
I see it in a lot of the drawings.
I was drawing on my fellow soldiers.
That looking off into the unknown,
the fear of the unknown, what is tomorrow going to bring,
so that's that unchecked fear.
All the way to skirting the lines of narcissism,
like the guy in the bottom right there.
So that vulnerability of sitting for a portrait, that
would become a very interesting part
of the components of the Veteran Print Project,
this exercise in trust, the trust
between artists and subject.
When I talk about trust with my participants of the Veteran
Print Project, I tell the veterans
that are participating, this is an exercise in trust
because you have to trust that you are offering
your story to another person.
And they are going to listen to it.
And they are going to absorb it.
And they're going to translate it and visually depict it.
And that makes you vulnerable.
You don't know what the end result is going to be.
But you have to trust that that conversation is
going to be meaningful, and it's going to be reciprocal.
And so take the time, trust in the artist, trust
in the process, see what might come out of it.
When I'm talking to the artists of the Veteran Print Project,
I tell them, this is an exercise in trust
because you, as an artist, have to trust
in your artistic capabilities, trust in your style, trust
in what you do best.
Don't change who you are.
Don't change the style of your artwork
to fit the person, the subject that you're depicting.
Do what you do best, listen to the story,
and hope that what you produce will
be accepted by the veteran.
And do we get it right 100% of the time?
Absolutely, not.
There are moments where we have missed opportunities, where
the artist doesn't capture what the veteran thought
they would capture.
And we don't-- we're not upset about that.
That's part of the process.
That opens up even more lines of dialogue,
more conversations, more learning experiences come out
of that.
Why did we miss the mark?
What happened?
There's no wrong answer in the Veteran Print Project.
It's about conversations.
And that is the exercise in trust
that you think about when you're doing portrait drawing.
When I write about artists in the field,
I note an occurrence of a specific type of mark making
that implies the literal marking of the passage of time.
If you're familiar with drill and ceremony,
then you may know that the phrase "marking time"
means to march in place.
Each step neither advances nor retreats,
but it marches steadily to nowhere.
So too are the marks made by some of these artists, whose
marks, whose brushstrokes, whose pencil marks
matched the passage of time, like we see in the work
by Civil War veteran John Gaddis.
He often painted when he was on sentry duty, which
means he's on guard duty.
And any one of us that has served on guard duty
means that you have to stay awake and alert
for long periods of time.
And if you're an artist, that means
capturing what's around you.
And so you can see John Gaddis in the foreground.
He was often on a hill, down looking troops
on a field, drilling troops.
But I started writing about Gaddis
because each little individual watercolor
brushstroke doesn't have-- it doesn't
give a lot of information.
But it literally is the tick tock
of the clock of time going by.
And when you zoom out, like in an impressionist painting,
it has the whole composition, is actually showing you
the laborious movement of troops,
like you see the movement in these troops.
But you also see not only the laborious movement
of the troops but the laborious passage of time while sitting
on guard duty.
So I'm starting to think about how
these marks on paper in the artwork of these veterans
comes to play in the passage of time.
In my own artwork, I've also embraced
this repetitive and this meditative mark making.
Part of my line work started because I
wanted to add some more graphic sensibilities
to my compositions.
But I also found that this repetitive line work is also
a great way to layer symbolism into the work.
The most common repetitive line or symbol that I use
is derived from my attraction to the ritual from my compulsion
to say the Hail Mary and the soothing nature of praying
the rosary, which, of course, is the influence
of the Catholic iconography that surrounded me and my youth.
At some point, I realized, in the military,
that the silhouette on a range card that we
use to qualify with our weapons, that silhouette
can look like the Virgin Mary, which
then translates to a woman wearing a headscarf or a hijab.
Especially if you put the crosshairs on the range card
silhouette, it really has that emblematic,
that iconic Virgin Mary silhouette with a halo.
I have one distinct, very distinct memory in Iraq
where I'm pointing my weapon at a woman wearing a headscarf,
and she's holding a child.
And I realized that moment that I was pointing my weapon
at the Virgin Mary.
The repetition in my line work has so many layered symbols,
but for the most part, these repetitions of lines
are a literal translation of my self-inflicted penance
and a need for me to reconcile my beliefs with my actions,
with my experiences.
Marked time, when we look at marked time,
it is the essence of captured memory.
All of these drawings are mementos.
And these mementos become more than just a keepsake,
they're heirlooms.
In an essay called "Notes on the Post Indexical,"
the author is writing about Pliny.
If you remember me talking about Pliny earlier,
his story is not just the story about the origins of painting,
but it is a story about loss and strategies of remembrance.
I just think the phrase "strategies of remembrance"
is so beautiful.
And if we're talking about loss, we have to remember,
we're not just talking about loss of life.
We're talking about loss of a family member being removed
from the family unit and is taken away
for a long period of time in deployment.
So loss isn't just death.
Loss is separation from a loved one.
And these drawings are strategies to remember.
These drawings, this passage of time, for me, in my opinion,
it's the preparation for a time to come
when all you have is memory or when
memory is being taken from you.
These artworks aren't always fully realized
images, whether it's because guard duty ended,
and you didn't have time to finish it,
or they're just marked literal passages of time.
It makes them not really fully realized.
And that makes that heirloom now a designated space to remember.
Those two beautiful elements came out
of that essay, and that strategies of remembrance
and designated spaces to remember.
It's really important that we offer ourselves these moments.
Whether it's visually or meditatively,
we need to give ourselves designated spaces to remember.
If we're considering giving space to remember,
I want to share with you a realization I came to in 2018.
Most of you may know that 2018 was the 100-year commemoration,
the anniversary of the signing of the Armistice
that ended World War I.
Many in my field had been researching for years
and preparing for the exhibits, the events, and the discussions
about this historic topic.
Now, for some reason, World War I
is one of those specialized history topics, one
of the conflicts that's rarely discussed in America prior
to the Centennial.
Now, obviously, World War II is considered the creator
of the greatest generation.
So of course, it's going to be the most commonly
discussed conflict in our nation's history
beyond the Civil War.
Yes, we discussed Vietnam, we discussed Iraq and Afghanistan.
And there's a few wars that some people
refer to as the forgotten wars, like Korea and the Gulf War.
And World War I sometimes finds itself
in that category of the forgotten war.
But what is always confusing to those of us
that do study World War I is the lack of discussions about it
because it really was the catalyst for much
of the current political perspective and policy
that we see today.
So during strategic planning sessions at the Wisconsin
Veterans Museum at the end of 2018,
we were considering this question,
why does it still matter?
Why does the final narrative and the decisions
that were made at the end of World War I
still continue to affect world politics and policy today?
And the overarching sentiment was
this, which is really, in most institutions of humanities,
we need to remind--
we need to revisit this history, a continual revisitation
of this history, specifically World War I,
to remind us, to remind our audiences why we find ourselves
immersed in certain situations today, just
a short 100 years later.
Yesterday affects today, how?
And how does today affect tomorrow?
This was a revelation for me.
In 2018, there were so many events
going on to commemorate this 100-year anniversary.
And during this time, I was working
with a group of musicians in Madison, Wisconsin, who
were creating content for a concert called The Greatest
War, World War One, Wisconsin, and Why it Still Matters.
And they dubbed it a rock-and-roll history show.
I loved it.
The Kissers, John Wedge, who you see pictured here, he's
a historian and a member of The Periodicals, Sean Michael
Dargan, The November Criminals, a hip hop polka
group in Milwaukee, all of these groups
came together to tell the stories of Wisconsinites
and their role in World War I.
I was introduced to them because of all of the events
that you see on the left here that I was coordinating
and curating during that time.
But I was brought on to consult with them
to talk about the artist perspective,
like the art and the veteran perspective.
But the serendipitous part of this connection
was they were researching why it still
matters at the same time the Wisconsin Veterans Museum was
looking at why it still matters.
I'm researching art from World War I,
trying to figure out why it still matters.
And it started having an effect on me.
It opened a door.
And where another one door opened
about why it still matters, another door
opened, and then another door.
And all of these rabbit holes that I
was finding myself falling into changed my perspective.
It gave me a whole new perspective on everything.
It highly affected the way I started
looking at and analyzing art.
And it reignited the inspiration for why I created the Veteran
Print Project, to bridge this gap,
to be a conduit for the veteran to the disconnected society.
Now, collaborating in those 2018 events motivated me
to research topics--
excuse me, motivated me to research topics and situations
that I was completely unaware of about World War I.
And it pushed me to refer back and to reconsider what I really
thought I had already understood about the art history
that I had studied.
So thank you to art history.
I will always use art history as a guidepost
to help me evaluate the artwork that's being made
and the reasons why and maybe how my perspective changes.
So again, during this time, there
were all these events happening about World War I worldwide.
And there was these series of exhibits
that were happening in Madison.
And we were all asking, why does it still matter?
And then Warrior Writers invited me to come to Philadelphia
to teach about veteran artists in World War I.
And they asked me to teach about the global war on terror,
the post 9/11 veteran artists.
And I was brought there to share information
with their moderators, who would be hosting
facilitated conversations, as they're part of the dialogue
on war, National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
And their program was about reintegration and the arts.
So a good art historian is going to compare and contrast
to defend an argument.
Unintentionally, Warrior Writers gave me
the perfect compare-and-contrast opportunity for me
to connect World War I with global war on terror in a way
that I had never seen before.
And all of a sudden, the world was
starting to make sense to me.
Up to that point, I had not put the pieces
together of the eerie similarities between these two
generations.
I knew I was drawn to modernism during my art history courses,
but I hadn't yet identified the extent of that connection
until this moment, specifically, the artwork that was being
created by both generations.
All of this research was coming together,
and it was guiding me to these thoughts.
After World War I, artists were desperate to find
a visual language that depicted the complexities
of the catastrophic apocalypse they had just
experienced as both victims and as participants.
Society was wounded, and it was searching
for a new identity that was both splintered and, at times,
unconscious, or at best, uncomfortably numb.
The resulting artistic era was filled
with angled, disconnected fragments,
and abstracted realities.
Surreal images reveal confusing truths
of an implausible existence.
The rapidly advancing technologies
that had brought an overwhelming force of destruction
to the battlefield were being presented in societal portraits
of humans existing in a distracted theater
of complicit detachment from humanity.
The Armistice would provide some sense of closure,
and these artists would go on to define
what we now know as modernism.
In my own personal postwar experience,
I was studying art history, and I kept finding myself asking,
why does this genre, why does modernism
connect with me so much?
And why does it still matter?
And my answer is simple.
The artists returning from our military experiences
in the global war on terror in today's modern society,
we are also seeking a new creative language
to both depict and inform a disconnected society.
But rather than abstracted realities
and surreal interventions, we're immersing ourselves
in our communities.
We're actively engaging in a participatory
and a social process.
Is the transformative nature of this process
a metaphor for reintegration?
Let me describe the processes we're doing,
and maybe we'll reveal a deeper metaphor.
Marks are made on metal.
That metal's dipped into acid, so a chemical alteration
will provide a void for ink to occupy,
until it's pressed into a sheet of paper to reveal an image.
This is the process to create multiples of the same thing.
Rag is being cut down, it's beaten to a pulp,
placed in a vat, scooped up, and pressed
into a new sheet of paper.
This is the process of deconstruction and reformation.
Pliable clay is kneaded and folded.
It is of the earth mineral and water molded into a form.
It is exposed to high temps that allow it to harden.
And thus, it is strengthened.
This is the process of malleable fortitude.
Reintegration implies that there's a return to something
that existed before.
Today, as veteran artists, we are
revealing the implausibility of that charge.
We are seeking a more literal--
a more literal meaning to the word "reintegration."
Reintegration is the act of restoring elements
that were disparate to unity.
Community immersion recreates the camaraderie
of service in an effort to deflect isolation.
Global war on terror artists, we don't have an Armistice.
In a state of perpetual war, we don't have an opportunity
to find closure.
Thus, the outcome of our process is transformation, not closure.
And our narrative will remain transient.
So I'll ask you this, should healing
be a requirement for transformation?
And if so, let's think about who is being healed.
How often do civilians think the veteran is seeking
healing when the veteran believes
they're seeking to heal society and not the self?
Now, I can't take credit for those last few works.
Jesse Albrecht-- oh, it skipped it, sorry.
Jesse Albrecht, I'll find him here.
Here he is.
Jesse Albrecht, who you see here,
shared that sentiment about healing in an interview he
did when he discussed his work.
He challenged this idea of, who's really being healed?
And I love Jesse's question about healing.
And it means a lot to me because every single art talk I go to,
the dominating topic is not the art but about healing.
And that's OK, but I like that Jesse pushes it back to you
to really think about, who's being healed,
who needs to be healed?
And there's no right or wrong answer to this.
I just really like that he pushes it back.
And it's not just on us to absorb this concept of healing.
Jesse's an incredible human being.
And I served with him in Iraq.
He's making a name for himself in contemporary ceramics
right now and in contemporary arts right now.
So shout out to Jesse Albrecht.
Now, I shared those thoughts with you
about my revelation in 2018 because even though they
were written as part of my participation in the Greatest
War rock-and-roll history show, they also
prompted me to really reevaluate the direction
that my creative process was taking me.
The way I started--
after 2018, the way I started discussing my artwork shifted.
The way I started looking at the Veteran Print Project shifted.
The way in which I look at artwork created by veterans
has shifted.
Throughout this artist's talk today, I
have circled back to this narrative
to show how this all ties together
and to show how I'm moving forward
with my practice as both artist and as curator.
When I first wrote those ideas in 2018,
we had not yet removed ourselves from Afghanistan.
And those words now are even more profound to me
because they're still yet--
we still don't have closure.
And that's why I say our narrative will
remain transient.
We'll continue to-- we'll continue to have conversations
about this topic, and we'll continue
to understand what it means to be in a status of perpetual war
and what that looks like in a disconnected society.
What does it mean to be in perpetual war and a conflict
that's not in your own backyard?
When you don't go outside every morning with a reminder,
hey, we're at war, like how do you
have conversations with a society that
is complicit in what is happening and completely
unaware of what the realities are of war?
I try to do that in my artwork.
I try to use symbolism and storytelling to shed light
on topics that I find difficult to discuss because I really do,
I have a hard time discussing certain things.
I try to build a narrative in these pieces of artwork.
And that narrative helps me defend my work,
and it helps me expand on it.
And once I'm able to expand on it,
then I'm able to have much deeper conversations.
And there's a lot of artists that will lean back
toward mythology, will lean toward Shakespeare,
that will lean toward imagined worlds to help bridge the gap
and tell that story of hard topics to discuss.
Artwork has the power to do that.
I love talking about World War I artists because the things
that I learn, as I learn more about that artwork,
helps me make much more sense of the world of the artwork that's
being created by the Emerging Veteran Artists right now.
And I've started to write about my contemporaries
through an art history lens.
And that's been extremely informative.
Writing about my contemporaries reminds me
about the Veteran Print Project and how
I discussed the process of somebody else absorbing
your story to my veteran participants.
When I have a veteran, who is an artist,
the process is a little bit different
because for the most part, our artists
are civilians, civilian printmakers,
who are interviewing veterans.
The veteran doesn't make the artwork,
the artist makes the artwork.
But when I have a veteran who is a printmaker,
like myself, I'm a printmaker and a veteran,
I ask the veteran to offer their story
to an artist and not to make an autobiographical print.
And then I asked them to interview
another veteran, hopefully, somebody that's
of a different branch of service, a different gender,
different generation, somebody with a completely
different experience.
And this will help reveal your own personal biases.
It helps you gain an understanding of an experience
other than your own.
And I encourage that because I was able to see, firsthand,
the results when I was interviewing-- when I started
interviewing other veterans.
I revealed my own preconceived notions.
And I had to bypass my personal story in an effort
to genuinely capture another's experience with integrity
and with empathy.
Being able to write about my contemporaries
in the veteran art movement, in real time,
looking at the deeper psychological meaning
of the way we're creating work or the methodologies
we're using or how we approach our craft,
knowing these people personally and trying
to write about them has been really interesting.
It's helped me consider how others
might be examining my artwork, how others might be analyzing
my story, my artwork.
It's important for us to understand how
people interpret our stories.
How people are interpreting my story or your artwork
is always going to be from a different lens,
through a different lens.
The Veteran Print Project helped me see that
by me allowing somebody else to portray my story.
But it's hard when you tell your story,
and somebody else translates it through a new point of view.
And this same front, I worked with Martin McClendon
at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
He's a professor of theater there.
And they do this series of verbatim plays, where
they interview veterans, and they
create a script using the actual words of the veterans
and make a cohesive plot tying all these stories together.
These are award-winning plays.
They're incredible.
And I've been lucky enough to participate twice
for two different events.
But the first time I saw my story portrayed
by a really talented actress, I had
this moment where I thought, wow,
is that how others hear and see my story?
Is that how they see my actions?
Because that's not what I felt, or that's not what I meant.
But our words and our actions, though very personal to us,
are not always the way others absorb them.
And it's not always the way they're
going to translate them.
One of the reasons I started the Veteran Print Project was yes,
absolutely, to create dialogue.
But another reason I started it was based off of my reaction
to students in the classes I was attending in art school, that
were motivated to depict military imagery without having
any personal connection to it.
I did that before I joined the Army, so I get it.
I get it.
The imagery is cool, right?
But these students didn't have any personal connection
to that imagery.
And with the increase in gaming platforms, the development
of these realistic simulation games,
we have a new generation of artists creating work that
is digitally super realistic.
And they're creating it based off of imagery that I really
hope is research based.
Object research, they're definitely doing.
They understand the mechanism of war.
But human research, I'm not sure.
I know there are veterans in the industry because I was studying
with them at Wake Tech.
But I'm not sure of the personal connections that
are being made between artists and imagery
that's being created.
I'm a huge advocate for research being
a major component of the artist experience because I think,
there's a responsibility to understand what you're creating
and why.
And not all artists will agree with me.
Not all artists believe there needs
to be a research section--
excuse me, research practice in conjunction
with your artist practice.
I'm one of the people that is an advocate for research.
And of course, I understand, there's
going to be parody, pastiche, fictionalized worlds,
and a lot of ways to take artistic creative license.
But I just don't think that ignorance should be one
because there's a reality.
There's a real world behind what's
being documented visually.
And there are personal human stories
from people who wear that uniform.
We've created so many fictionalized, dehumanized,
over heroized, romanticized versions of military service
that it makes it really just too easy to put this character out
there in full battle rattle with a neck gaiter
up to their goggles.
We have essentially, in this world,
made our connection to military service, to warfare faceless.
My initial hope for the Veteran Print Project
was to connect the civilian with the veteran
to start a dialogue, to help civilians
use art as a catalyst for conversation,
and to help the veteran feel comfortable
sharing their story in an effort to find a shared
human experience.
Veteran Print Project was one of the earlier--
like post-9/11, was one of the earlier efforts to bridge
the civilian-veteran gap.
And after just over 12 years, over 100 prints created,
with over 100--
depicting over 100 veteran stories,
the Veteran Print Project has helped narrow that gap
of the civilian-veterans--
excuse me, that gap of the civilian-veteran divide.
But that gap still remains.
And unfortunately, we have some new terrain to cover.
There is now a veteran-to-veteran gap.
And I'm not talking about the generational veteran-to-veteran
divide, the Vietnam Veterans trying to welcome in the Gulf
War or World War II to Vietnam.
That's not the veteran-to-veteran generational
gap I'm talking about.
The veteran-the-veteran gap exists
because we continue to remain in Iraq,
and we only recently left Afghanistan.
And those stories continue to evolve.
New veterans continue to come out of the military.
And as those stories evolve, they're
revealing a great discrepancy.
For example, my experience in Mosul, Iraq in 2003,
as you can see pictured in the palace here from 2003,
my experience is going to be vastly
different from somebody returning home from Mosul, Iraq
today.
That's like what's left of the palace.
It doesn't exist anymore.
The soldiers coming home today, their perspective
and their interaction with the Iraqi people
is going to be completely different than my interaction
with the Iraqi people.
The landscape of the country is completely different.
And the reflections on the mission of why we're there
are incredibly changed.
Since my time in Iraq, there have been four different United
States presidents.
Some of the service members, now deployed to the area,
were not even born when 9/11 happened.
Until 2019, there were people serving
in Afghanistan, who were born after the terror attack--
after the terror attack that prompted that conflict.
There's also a disconnect from society
to the familial loss of a loved one being
gone for long periods of time.
Outside of the military or beyond the cliche welcome-home
surprise videos, we don't really see the impact
on the families and the day-to-day lives of a loved
one serving overseas.
The stories of the family members just aren't being told.
And I can tell you, firsthand, I've been on both sides of it.
It's harder to be on the home front.
And I think there are people that will disagree with me,
but it's hard to live in the unknown of what
is really happening over there.
When you're deployed, you have some sense of what's going on.
You have an idea of the danger that you're in.
But when you're on the home front, you have no idea.
You don't get a lot of that information.
So those stories need to be told.
The stories of the family member are really important.
And this concept, while it's not new,
is something that my confidence has
grown that I want to highlight.
One of the great things about working in the Veteran Print
Project is that I get to meet a lot of different veteran
organizations.
And one of them that's near and dear to my heart
is the American GI Forum.
And through the American GI Forum,
I've grown to understand how they embrace the family
member as an honorary veteran.
The family member is a veteran as well because they
lived that experience with you.
They have their own side of the story that should be told.
Now, the Print Project is looking at ways
to make that effort happen.
We're continuing our partnership with the Milwaukee Institute
of Art and Design.
And we want to start telling the stories of the family,
not just of the veteran because that support system is
the other side of the military narrative
that we don't hear about.
Now, an interesting part of running the Veteran Print
Project, while simultaneously, trying to nurture my own art
practice and thrive as a curator of veteran art,
is understanding how all of these separate things
influence my thinking and how I motivate
myself to move forward.
Sometimes, this requires that I distance myself
from the Veteran Print Project.
Logistically, I can't completely disconnect
because the project, as it's currently structured,
would cease to exist.
And that's OK.
Someday, that might be the case.
But as new collaborations continue to emerge,
I'll make sure I keep the project on track.
But what's curious is that as my own personal narrative shift,
as my perspective shifts on world politics
and my perspective shifts on my role in the grand scheme
of things, I'm expecting to see a similar shift in the Veteran
Print Project narratives.
I'm expecting to see the veteran stories evolve in the same--
in parallel to mine.
And that's just not the case, that's
not reality, which is why I need to remind
myself to distance myself because VPP is not about me,
me, me.
It's about the participants and their stories.
And the stories that I expect to come out
of each new round of Veteran Print Project prints
are not always the stories they get told.
I always keep thinking, I'm going to see certain stories.
And those aren't the ones that are getting told.
But it's those unexpected stories
that help remind me of the big diversity
of the human sentiment.
Veteran Print Project helps me remain connected to experiences
that are other than my own.
It helps me remain connected to the stories of today's veterans
and of the veterans in the past.
And it works as a bit of a barometer for me
to differentiate how my own perspective changes in relation
to the general shared experience and whether that's changing,
or it's not changing.
The stories that are coming out of the Veteran Print Project
are what we had hoped would come out,
which are individual, personalized narratives
about a shared human experience.
These narratives are visually reflected
by an artist who, I really hope, is really
connected to them as well.
The variety of stories range from the whimsical
to the philosophical, from the traumatic to the joyous.
And some are even grounded enough to focus
beyond the military subject matter
as part of their narrative.
Now, if my measurement for success
is based on the principles of the original concept
of the Veteran Print Project, and that's
to share a conversation that will prompt
the creation of a piece of art to continue that dialogue, then
yeah, we've succeeded.
But the Veteran Print Project, it's also changed me.
As incredible as it is to hear all of these various stories
and the perspective of each individual participant,
it can take its toll, especially when
my other professional endeavors require me to also
be immersed in first-person narratives that
accentuate this fact-based timeline of military history.
The reality of studying history of something
that you were a part of can be very
challenging psychologically.
And at times, it can make it difficult to remain objective,
especially when the war carries on.
And there is no finality to that timeline.
The cyclical nature of history allows
us to see how far we've come or perhaps
how far we've retreated.
Or sometimes, it just reveals that some things
will remain the same, and they just won't ever change.
It's in those moments, though, where I think some veterans--
I won't speak for all veterans.
Some veterans start to ask, well, then what was it all for?
Sometimes, it's nice to reveal the connection to a generation
that came before you.
This repetitive nature of history allows--
this repetitive nature of history creates traditions.
And the sharing of traditions can bring great pride.
But some traditions can also create great divides.
And not everybody always has a part--
has a chance to be a part of a tradition.
Not all the time are people welcome to be
invited into that tradition.
Everybody doesn't always have a seat at the table
because history is not always kind.
And that's just a reminder to me to continue to ask,
why does it still matter?
My personal work is transitioning
from using visual language that reflects
my military experiences toward new investigations,
investigations of the celebrated topics within my own family's
lineage and my own family folklore.
I'm trying to gain an understanding of family
behaviors that ultimately chose to reject our Mexican lineage
in favor of elevating and celebrating
our Spanish heritage.
My work is now trying to create visual defenses
to fight back against the denial of that part of my identity.
After so many years of considering
the realities of the celebrated militarism in this country
and my role within that narrative,
I'm now wanting to return to the roots
of my own personal history.
And I think, like many in our communities today,
I'm considering new ways to commemorate the past, new ways
that don't require or expect us to build monuments
to worship or finding heroes that we're going to promote.
There will always be layered symbols within my work.
That will always be a part of my work.
And it will draw meaning from personal trauma, all the way
to the amplified collective trauma over the last few years.
And maybe, hopefully, in all of this,
in this new creation of work, maybe, I
will be able to create a designated space to remember.
So thank you all for listening to me.
Here, you see some current and upcoming exhibits.
Relative Perception comes down in just this week in Milwaukee.
O Say Can You See is on exhibit in Pennsylvania
through December.
I'm really excited.
We'll be at Syracuse University National Veteran Resource
Center gallery, which is brand new.
And I'm an alumni of their entrepreneur
program for women veterans.
So I'm excited to be one of the first exhibits
in that new space.
And then save the date, I was a curatorial fellow
for the inaugural Veteran Art Triennial.
And our second one is coming in March of this year.
And I'm excited that I'll have some of my work
on exhibit in that.
And then if you visit the Wisconsin Veterans Museum
website on our Events page, I host a monthly drink and draw.
And it still remains virtual, where
I pick an object from our collection or a story,
and then we sketch.
And we have some fun while drawing.
I did pretty good on time.
I think I left this room for questions.
Here's a slide with all of my contact info.
But I'll stop talking now and open it up for questions.
I appreciate that you shared so many artists of note,
artists who you've collaborated with, organizations, et cetera.
But I guess I'd kick it off by saying,
are there any other organizations,
both in support of veterans and the arts
and veterans' collaborative projects or artists that you
weren't able to sort of embed that you would like
to amplify and share with us?
Gosh, yeah.
It's funny, as I was creating this, there's so many--
I've been really lucky to participate
with so many different people.
There's a theater group in Wisconsin that has grown,
called Feast of Crispian, and they
use the words of Shakespeare to work with veterans,
to use those words and find out just
how relevant they are to today's service members that
are coming out of the military.
And I had just started working with them
to try to bring more programs to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
But they are national.
They're called Feast of Crispian,
based out of Wisconsin.
Of course, the VA System has incredible programs
that are accessible out there.
Jason Moon does Warrior Songs, which
is essentially a Veteran Print Project doing
using songwriting.
I mentioned Martin McClendon at Carthage College
in the verbatim theater.
The Emerging Veteran Artists, there's--
I should find the website.
I should have put it up there for all of the links
to the artists that are working in this movement
right now because there's performance art theater, poetry
writing, prose, a lot of writing programs exist out there.
I can always send a link.
I have a long list of contacts to go to.
One thing that you mentioned repeatedly
was that collecting these first-person stories
can really take a toll, emotionally and mentally.
And so I'd be curious to know how
you care for yourself, both as a creative
and also just as a human being and a veteran.
How do you-- how do you care for yourself in all of that work?
I think learning to communicate and actually,
identifying that it was actually affecting me.
I've been a storyteller my whole life.
The whole reason the Print Project started
was because we were all isolating veterans,
we're isolated and only talking to each other.
And so I knew we had to find ways to talk to other people.
And when I started realizing that I was losing my ability
to-- or want to tell my story or that I didn't really want--
that I was actually finding a new way to isolate, I'm lucky,
I have a really good support system.
And the vet working at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum,
I am only able to be open and honest with my colleagues
about how this affects me.
And so being able to have colleagues that are also
very aware of that, that maybe they
need to take the reins of something.
Even though you might be really good at it, even though you
might be the best candidate for this,
maybe stepping in and saying, why don't we take this one?
You take some time to just be who you are.
And then finally, I will say, in the last couple of years,
I finally did start going to the VA and talk to somebody.
I didn't think I needed that for almost 12 years.
And I think everybody's timeline is different.
I was told as soon as I got out of the Army
that I needed to be talking to somebody, and I was like,
but I'm already talking, it's not a big deal.
And it took about 12 years before I actually sat down,
formally, to talk to somebody.
So I think, support system, being
really grateful to have a support system,
and being able to maybe see when somebody else needs one.
And you can be the support system for them.
Well, hello, Yvette.
Long time no see.
This is my roommate from the Mission Continues
when we did a fellowship together.
[LAUGHS]
So probably about 10 years now.
So I do work in the VA.
I work in a brand new community engagement position
in the Suicide Prevention Program.
And I just-- one of the priority areas that we have
is promoting connectedness and improving care transitions.
This is such a huge aspect of that.
I just wondered if there was any connection to any of the State
Governor Challenges because that's a VA-SAMHSA partnership
to prevent suicide in veteran and military-connected families
at the state level.
So it convenes a statewide coalition.
But the priority areas are all aligned with what you're doing.
I mean, the whole time you're talking,
I know I'm looking at it through a suicide prevention lens,
but that's what it is.
Yeah, I mean--
And I just wondered if there was any connection to even though--
because all 50 states have a Governor's Challenge.
Yeah, do you mean does Veteran Print
Project have that connection?
Like if there's any-- to either any specific suicide prevention
programming or groups or anything within that arena.
I mean, I've done stuff like that
before but nothing in the works right now.
I mean, I'm always open to make that connection.
And because I was working with the Wisconsin Veterans Museum,
we are a state organization or a state education component
of the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs.
So we have that direct connection
to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
And they've brought me in and embraced the Veteran Print
Project in that way.
But that's sort of where my role at the museum has evolved to,
is like, how do we use the arts to create that connection
to the statewide?
And now, I'm actually work there,
but I do consulting work with the museum now.
I relocated to North Carolina.
And so now, I'm also a little bit--
I'm able to not be a state employee anymore.
So I can expand nationwide and still emphasize the great work
that Wisconsin is doing and still
continue to consult with them.
But we can look at ways that--
this project, we've tried to get it with the VA a while back.
But for whatever reason, it just didn't flesh out.
Well, yeah, that's-- it's a big bureaucracy.
[CHUCKLES]
Yeah.
But that's where a community engagement
position that's working outwardly
with a lot of different--
I mean, they're the coalitions that
have faith based, have schools like allow the colleges
and universities.
There's a lot of veteran-friendly employers.
I mean, it's comprised of a lot of different stakeholders.
But I just see so many connection points
to a lot of the Suicide Prevention work
that's going on because it's a public health approach now.
which is suicide prevention.
Yeah, I was going to say, I will say,
the really cool thing is I am with Collective Care.
I really am seeing institutions like Chaffey really
start to embrace the idea of collective care
and utilizing different formats to address that.
And they're are embracing that within the veteran community.
And what's nice about connecting that to veteran community
is the veteran community has that same diversity of thought
in humanity.
We have so many different points of view, perspective,
experiences within the military component
that we need to be helping veterans,
with every different perspective,
have a place to discuss and have a place, that outlet
to share their stories.
So yeah, I think there's always opportunity.
And I'm happy to continue that and figure out what we
can do because it's important.
I just don't think that's a coincidence that you kept
circling into my purview because like I said,
there's just a lot of connection points.
So I just love to have a conversation with you.
Yeah, we definitely--
--to know a little bit more in depth, not just to catch up.
[CHUCKLES]
Oh, yes.
That's always a plus.
But yeah, for sure, we'll be linking up.
And then if anybody else has ideas out there too.
I know Vera Roddy is in the audience.
She's doing work with Gulf War veterans
but doing work with another NEH grant.
And I can put you in contact with her.
and the work she's doing also with veterans, and specifically
a lot of work with women veterans.
And that's what-- I mean, I used to manage the Women Veterans
program, so I know these were the type of events
and these are the type of programs that are really
just anything to get women to tell their story, especially,
since it's a story that's not heard enough.
Yeah, it's tough to get women to share their stories.
That is one of the toughest things out there.
I've been really lucky, the women veterans in Wisconsin
are my family, are the reason why I'm here,
why my career is where it's at.
But even those women, who are always very generous with
their story, when it comes to public platforms, they're--
women are good about pushing other women forward
while putting ourself on the back shelf.
And helping each other learn to put our stories forward
is important.
It wasn't as important to me when I first got out,
but I didn't understand it.
And now, I really have a much greater understanding
of that need and importance.
So yeah, thank you for coming today.
I'm really excited you're here.
Yeah, I wanted to hear more about the Print Project.
And I saw that this was going on,
and it was going to be a lot more in depth, so.
Well, thank you.
I have a-- I see there's a question about the process,
right?
Cindy, you want to talk about the process?
So the way the project was started was--
obviously, working at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum,
I had access to oral histories.
And originally, the process was a recorded oral history
was given to the artist.
And they never met the veteran.
And then when we moved the project to Colorado State,
the oral history component wasn't as accessible
as it was in Wisconsin.
So we had to have the veteran meet
the artists out of logistics.
And that ended up creating a much richer experience
because you actually are engaging in a conversation.
And that's where the idea of dialogue really blossomed.
And so I work with organizations.
The Veteran Print Project, essentially, starts--
it works best like when you have a university that
has a veteran community and an art community,
like printmakers.
But it's not a requirement.
It's not a requirement.
Essentially, if I have a group of veterans
that are willing to tell their story,
I'll find artists that are willing to create the prints.
I'm kind of a stickler.
It has to be printmaking for my project, hand-pulled prints.
We've evolved a little, but there's other--
people have modeled the project in different mediums.
But Print Project is prints.
So yeah, it's really about finding artists
who can create a hand-pulled print
and having veterans that want to tell their story.
It's funny, sometimes, I have a harder time finding artists,
and I have all these veterans waiting.
And then sometimes, I have--
like in Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design sometimes,
I've been working with Rina Yoon, their professor.
So it's for a class.
So I have a specific number of artists.
And she's really strict.
So she doesn't just let them get away
with making one print per semester.
She makes them interview three different veterans
and do an addition on three different veterans.
So that makes it hard for me because then, I
have to find-- let's say I have 10 students in the class,
now, I have to find 30 veterans.
[LAUGHS] So it's kind of a balancing
act of your participants.
But if you're doing it at your institution, a lot-- you'll
be surprised how many student veterans you have
and some that won't identify as veterans or artists, who
actually are veterans, that won't identify
their veteran experience.
And so for me, the Print Project works well
because I offer the opportunity that you don't actually
have to share-- your story doesn't
have to be about the military if you don't want it to be.
You just happen to be a veteran, and you're sharing a story.
And sometimes, through conversations,
that military experience organically
comes out because they've built a trust.
And now, they feel comfortable telling you a little bit more
about who they are.
But if you allow people to tell whatever side of the story
they want, then you don't have to--
people feel better about sharing when they don't feel forced
or coerced into any expected result. Take the pressure off.
That's why I tell the artist, yes, the artwork is beautiful,
but that's not the point of this all.
And I don't want to discredit that because I get some really
amazing, beautiful prints.
I have a lot of beautiful prints in the collection.
And I'm really grateful.
But the stories that have come out,
it goes up a little higher.
[LAUGHS] I value the stories.
I'm wondering, too, with that.
Are they given a prompt?
Like when to share the story and it's like what prompt are the--
So I actually give them a handout
that is taken from oral history best practices.
And for the Print Project, I use the Library
of Congress sample questions for veterans
because another reason why I started the project was--
it's not as much anymore, but when we were first getting out
in '03, '04 people were-- the whole thing of, oh,
did you kill anybody, like learning to have proper
conversations.
And I always compare it to when you meet somebody,
you don't introduce yourself, hi, I'm Yvette,
and then when you're introducing yourself say,
oh, were you abused as a child?
Like that's not a question that you would ever ask somebody
when you first meet them.
So why would you ask them those invasive questions
about being a veteran?
So I give you some sample oral history best practice questions
to get this started.
But like I said, I was a cook in the army.
So for me, the best advice I give is to talk about food.
Food prompts so much memory.
And I always tell people, this is
how I got to know my soldiers.
If you talk about food, then you know people's likes
and dislikes.
You know how they were raised because you know,
did they have food, did they not have food?
If they did have food, who was preparing it?
What were they preparing?
What is food that makes you happy?
What is food that makes you nostalgic?
But you get to know a lot about a person simply by the food
that they eat and their access to food.
So when all else fails, have a conversation about food.
It works.
Music, too.
But food is really the common denominator.
We all have to eat.
Can I ask a follow up, Yvette?
Yeah.
I'm curious if these conversations are documented
as part of the process.
Sorry, if these conversations are documented, what?
As part of your process, are they being--
So like I said, we originally had the oral histories,
like we were trying to bring a new generation of veterans
at the Wisconsin--
I was doing my work study at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.
And we were trying to bring a new generation
of oral histories to get recorded before we forgot them.
Don't wait 50 years to record that oral history.
So we had access to that.
And then my dream was always to have the recorded oral history
be the component of it.
And that just hasn't really happened.
If an institution has access to recording
of the oral histories, then we'll do it.
My thing is about recording the oral histories.
Sorry, so before I get to that point,
the artist has to give me a paragraph on the print.
So that goes with the print, the narrative of the story.
But the recording of oral histories,
if it's not at an institution of humanities,
like the Veterans Museum has an oral history collection, so you
sign a release form, it's recorded,
you have a right to make it private or public,
or like Library of Congress, their release forms.
I'm very particular about rights and privileges and also
privacy, rights to privacy.
And so for me, I don't have the capacity
to properly store this archive.
So if I have an institution where we can put those recorded
archives, then we'll do that.
But for the Veteran Print Project,
it's just one level that I'm not privy to.
I am going to be--
we did reach out to the artists at our 10-year anniversary--
I'm sorry, to the participants to see how
they've changed over 10 years.
And we did add some like follow-up narrative
to their experience.
And that's something I want to work on
In the next couple of years.
And Zoom is going to offer me this new ability
to actually maybe record some of those conversations
of the experience of the Veteran Print Project.
And they can talk about their print in that capacity.
Rebecca had asked a question in the chat before, and--
Oh, OK.
--share it.
Am I cutting out too, or am I sounding--
No, I hear you.
OK, cool.
So Rebecca had noted that you often
say that art has a power to be transformative, and we 100%
agree, and also that healing and art as therapy
are not necessarily the goal.
Can you talk about the intersections and differences
between healing, art as therapy, and the transformative nature
of art making?
It seem like interesting and important distinctions.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think at one point in time,
I considered going into art therapy.
And I think that art therapy is extremely valuable.
And the people in that field are doing incredible work.
And art therapy allows folks to come to the table
and use the creative process to work through a trauma,
to work as therapy.
And the artists that I talk about on my work,
while therapeutic, isn't always the main goal.
And I think there's a lot of us that--
I get kind of-- sometimes, I struggle
because I can get a little personally snobby about it,
but it's because I've been drawing and painting
since I was a kid.
And so my goal has always been to be an artist.
And often, we get lumped into art therapy.
Then I do these presentations, and I
realized how much of the art work
actually does result in healing of some sort.
I think, the transformation is from personal realizations
that maybe revelations that come out of that process.
Maybe, you see your experience-- like I talked a lot
about seeing your experience through a different lens,
like somebody else observing your experience
and giving it back to you.
It's hard to see that sometimes.
It's hard to really--
like with that play, the reason why
I wanted to talk about the play, the verbatim play
was I sunk into my chair the night
that was performed because I couldn't
believe that that's how--
they really performed my exact words back.
But the way it was acted out was not at all
the way I saw myself.
And I actually had to revisit some of my friends
that that personal narrative, that dialogue was taken from.
I revisited friends that that interaction
had happened with to see which way was real,
like the way I saw it or the way that it was portrayed.
And oddly, it was much more of the way it was portrayed.
And we talk about-- it took me 12 years
to finally go to the VA.
Well, that was sort of that realization.
I've been on this soapbox for years,
like we're not art therapy, yet it's taken me 12 years
to realize I finally needed to talk to somebody because all
these stories I was sharing, that I thought I was just
fine, were actually indicators of you
should be talking to somebody else.
And I didn't realize that about myself
until I had been out long enough and started
interacting with veterans who had just got out.
And I was listening to the way they would talk
and their behaviors.
And I was like, whoa, we need to calm down.
I hate to say the word calm down.
But like when they--
some of the veterans coming out are just so
amped up that I was able to step outside of my body
and see how I was 10, 12 years ago.
And a light bulb went off.
I was like, oh, that's how people were hearing
what I was talking about.
And I thought I was just fine, like floating on air.
Look at me, I'm telling all these stories.
And so I think that's the transformation.
And the transformative process in the art, for me,
it's the literal transformation.
We have chosen mediums that literally
require transformation in order to get the end result.
So combat paper, for example, you
are literally tearing apart your uniform
and recreating it into something new and beautiful.
It's a whole new life to that memory.
It's a tangible recreation of that.
Printmaking, I always say, it mimics the military experience.
You have to have a lot of discipline.
You have to have a lot of intestinal fortitude,
as we say in the military.
It's the process of unknown outcomes.
And you do all of this because you're a little crazy,
and you have to be a little disciplined.
And the end result is to spit out multiples of the same,
just like in the military.
But each print still holds its intrinsic values that makes it
an individual, an original.
So we might all be standing in uniform,
looking exactly the same, but each one of us, in a formation,
still holds our own identity.
And that's a print to me.
Obviously, in clay, I mean, the metaphor
is really more on the nose, like it
has to go through the fire in order for it to harden.
And then the only way it will have its ultimate strength
is until it goes under that fire.
That, to me, is military experience.
So I think there's just--
the mediums, the performance art finds its way in that as well.
There's a literal transition of something that started here,
and it changes to end up here.
And in painting, you get that.
But painting kind of is what it is.
I mean, it depends on the way you paint.
But I just think my own personal artwork
shifted because I liked artwork that
challenged me, that something that isn't going to just
be easy and given.
I need to see that change happen in real time.
And I think the longer we're out,
the better we can have these conversations about comparing
these processes to our experiences or our perspective
on these experiences.
[MUSIC PLAYING]