Join the editors and project directors of Surviving the Long Wars for a virtual book launch celebrating their multi-year curatorial public humanities collaboration. Marking the release of Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024), this conversation explores the radical possibilities and challenges of crafting creative interventions grounded in solidarity and liberation.
Register to attend through Zoom.
MC:
Anthony Torres, NEH Veteran Fellow and theater artist
Speakers:
Aaron Hughes, Surviving the Long Wars co-curator and independent artist
Ronak K. Kapadia, Associate Professor and Director of Interdepartmental Graduate Concentration, Gender and , University of Illinois Chicago
Therese Quinn, Professor and Director, Museum and Exhibition Studies, University of Illinois Chicago
Meranda Roberts, Visiting Professor in Art History, Pomona College
Amber Zora, DEMIL Art Fund Program Manager
Partners:
Benton Art Museum at Pomona College -
Pomona College Art History
Gender and Women’s Studies Program, University of Illinois Chicago
DEMIL Art Fund
Bridge Books
emerging Veteran Art Movement
Order your copy of Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the End of Empire at BRIDGE Books
Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. He develops projects that utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence. Hughes works with a range of art and activist groups, including Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.
Ronak K. Kapadia is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer, and curator whose work explores race, war, aesthetics, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. He is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Kapadia is the author of the award-winning Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press, 2019), co-curator of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial, and co-editor of Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024). He is currently completing Inspiration: The Art of the Brown Queer Commons, a critical study of healing, justice, and pleasure within queer and trans of color aesthetics in the waning days of US empire and ecological collapse.
Therese Quinn, a teacher, writer, and cultural worker, has been active in queer and feminist anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist social movements for many years. She is employed as a Professor and Director of Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and researches the role of the arts, museums, and related institutions in justice-work. She coedits the Teachers College Press Series, Teaching for Social Justice and is a founding member of the Illinois Deaths in Custody Project, Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CreATE), and Teachers Against Militarized Education (TAME). She has authored and edited, often with others, books including School: Questions About Museums, Culture and Justice to Explore in Your Classroom (2020, Teachers College Press), Teaching Toward Democracy: Educators as Agents of Change, 2e (2016, Taylor and Francis), and Flaunt It! Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice (2009, Peter Lang) and published articles and other writings widely, including in American Quarterly, the Journal of Critical Military Studies, the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Issues in Education, the Journal of Museum Education, the Monthly Review, Rethinking Schools and Windy City Times.
Meranda Roberts is a citizen of the Yerington Paiute Tribe and Chicana. She has a Ph.D. in Native American History and an M.A. in Public History from the University of California, Riverside. Meranda has worked as a co-curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, where she developed new content for the museum’s Native American exhibition hall, "Native Truths: Our Stories. Our Voices." She curated the 2023 Native American Invitational Exhibition at Idyllwild Arts titled "Still We Smile: Humor as Correction and Joy" and is currently guest curating the exhibition "Continuity: Cahuilla Basket Weavers and their Legacies," which opened at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in February 2024. Meranda is also a visiting professor in the art history department at Pomona College. Meranda’s passion lies in holding colonial institutions, like museums, accountable for the harmful narratives they have created about Indigenous people. She is dedicated to reconnecting Indigenous collection items with their descendants and telling these items’ stories in a way that adequately expresses their meaning to the communities they come from. Using Indigenous methodologies and anti-colonial pedagogy, Meranda’s work exemplifies ways in which we can work toward a more equitable future.
Amber Zora is a curator, interdisciplinary artist, instructor and military veteran based in Rapid City, South Dakota. She holds an MFA in Photography and Integrated Media from Ohio University. Her work examines the trauma of war, the military’s impact on the environment, and rural America’s dependence on the military economy. Zora has curated exhibitions at the National Veteran Art Museum, the Oceanside Museum of Art and Contemporary at Blue Star. She developed the Veteran Artist Residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Amber has presented her work at the San Francisco Art Commission, Cal Poly University, the Library of Congress, and other notable spaces. As an organizer and nonprofit worker, Amber is dedicated to work with artists who build knowledge around peace, reconciliation and justice.
Anthony Torres is a poet, theater artist, and social worker whose work focuses on themes of transformation, healing, demilitarization, and social justice. After leaving the US Army in 2006, he moved to Miami, Florida, and began participating in local writing workshops to help process his military experiences. Over the past decade, Torres has been involved in many veteran-focused art projects, including hosting poetry open mic events for veterans and performing with The Combat Hippies, a theater ensemble organized with fellow Puerto Rican veterans. Under the artistic direction of Teo Castellanos, The Combat Hippies have written and toured two full-length productions: Conscience Under Fire (2015) and AMAL (2019). Torres and collaborator Hipólito Arriaga III were featured in Return to the Body, the 2019 Veteran Art Triennial’s performance program, and Torres returned to curate the Surviving the Long Wars performances.