Arts of War on the Web

A new monument (above) honoring all of those service personnel who have given their lives or have been wounded in action will be dedicated on March 8 at the  front entrance of the Warrior Hope and Care Center on the Marine Corps Base, Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina.  The organization Hope for The Warriors commissioned the creation of the monument.

The monument is the work of the acclaimed artist and sculptor John Phelps, a Vietnam veteran who received VVA’s Excellence in the Arts Award at the 2009 National Convention in Louisville. Phelps, whose son Chance was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, based the work on a photograph of two Marines, Chris Marquez and Dane Shaffer, carrying fellow Marine Bradley Kasal to safety in Iraq.

“I am honored to work with Hope For The Warriors in creating this monument,” Phelps said.  “I express myself through my art and this monument is a labor of love for me.  Love for not just my son but for my growing Marine Corps family.”

For more info, and to find out how to purchase bronze or resin miniature replicas of the sculpture, send an e-mail to rcork@hopeforthewarriors.org Proceeds from replica sales will support programs at the Warrior Hope and Care Center.

An excellent profile of the artist Helen White ran recently in the Nevada (Missouri) Daily Mail. The article talks about White’s work and how it was influenced by her service as a U.S. Army nurse in the Vietnam War. White did a tour of duty at the 67th Evac Hospital in Qui Nhon from 1969-70. The article also discusses White’s psychological readjustment problems since she came home and how her artwork has helped her deal with her PTSD.

“I don’t regret being there,” White said in the article in her hometown newspaper. “There’s a lot I wish I could have done. I got off the plane, did what I could. I got back on the plane and came home. Some people didn’t.”

White’s painting, “Sharon Lane (above),”  is one of fifteen of her works that is displayed at the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago. That painting also is part of “War Paint,” a traveling are exhibit that’s been on view at the Museum of Political History in St. Petersburg in Russia since December 1.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced on November 1 that Danh Võ—a Conceptual artist who fled his native Vietnam with his family in 1979 and settled in Denmark when he was four years old—has been awarded the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize, which is presented every two years for significant achievement in contemporary art.

“In his objects, installations, photographs, and works on paper,” a contemporary art  magazine said, “Danh Võ combines personal experiences from his childhood in Vietnam with the story of his family, their flight to Europe, and questions of colonialism, migration, and cultural identity. ”

Vo’s work has been shown in several prominent exhibitions, including shows at the New Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

“This year’s list was particularly strong, so it was a difficult choice,” said Nancy Spector, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim.  “It was a combination of his transnational sensibility and the subtlety and sophistication with which he works that people were moved by.”

In addition to a $100,000 prize,  Võ’s work will be exhibited at the famed Guggenheim Museum in New York early in 2013.

The artist Danh Vo

“Lens” is the name of a New York Times blog that features photography, video, and “visual journalism.” One of the current entries on the blog looks at the unique and innovative photographic images of Binh Danh, 34, a Vietnamese-American artist who grew up in California and has an MFA from Stanford University. Binh Danh’s work concentrates on his Vietnamese heritage and the American War in Vietnam. His work, he says, deals with “mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality.”

In 2001, two years after making his first trip to Vietnam, Danh invented a photographic technique, the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. From the start he has included images of the Vietnam War in his leaf photographs.

The article includes details on how the printing process works and Dinh’s reflections on being a Vietnamese-American and the continuing legacy of the Vietnam War.

Tom Kindt Hubbard of Columbia City, Indiana, was two years old when his father, U.S. Marine Sgt. Thomas Patrick Kindt, was killed in action in Vietnam on September 21, 1966. A few years ago, Hubbard, a graphic artist, took a strong interest in the details of his father’s Vietnam War experiences. That led to a trip to The Wall in Washington where he met Ed Henry, a VVA member who for many years has led tours for veterans, family members, and others of American War sites in Vietnam.

Henry helped Hubbard reconstruct his father’s tour of duty. Hubbard then went to Vietnam where he spent five weeks traveling with his mother and his wife, visiting sites where his father served, taking photographs, and keeping a journal. That resulted in a solo, multi-media exhibit, Semper Fidelis: How I Met My Father, which we described in the March/April 2004 issue of The VVA Veteran. The exhibit has run in several museums since its debut at the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Museum of Art in 2003.

Semper Fidelis will go on display again starting Thursday, March 29, at the Kent State University School of Art’s Downtown Gallery in Ohio. The exhibition, Hubbard says, “chronicles my quest to learn about my father, a U.S. Marine killed in Vietnam, and will be exhibited near the site of one of the most memorable and horrific anti-war protests in U.S. history.

“In conjunction with the show, a full-color exhibition catalogue has been produced and is now available. The 56-page catalogue contains critical essays and images of the ceramic, mixed media and photographic works from the exhibition and includes excerpts, working drawings and sketches from my personal sketchbooks documenting the journey.”

The guts of the exhibit are 21 ceramic vessels that he based loosely on military bunkers and artillery shells. Hubbard grafted words from his father’s letters onto the vessels, along with his own journal entries and photographs of Vietnam. Hubbard’s photographs, arranged in diptychs, and a family altar to his father also are part of the exhibit.

For more info, go to Hubbard’s website.

Rolf Kriken, the acclaimed California sculptor who served in the U.S. Army from 1962-65, is best known creating all of the bronze sculptures at the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento, such as the ones picture above.  Kriken, who runs Nordhammer Art Foundry in Kelseyville, California, also has done a series of other veterans’ and other memorial bronzes, including those for the Yuba City, California, Policeman’s Memorial; for the All Wars Memorial in Danville, California; the B.T. Collins Memorial in Sacramento; the Cleveland All Veterans Memorial in Ohio; and most recently, for the Veterans War Memorial in Madras, Oregon.

Kriken’s latest gallery show came last fall at the Mendocino College Gallery. The show, called “Voices from the Other Side,” was a collection of his distinctive bronzes with military themes. “These pieces are a statement about raising awareness of the consequences of war,” Kriken said. They include his “Baby Blue” series featuring the images of women. “Women give life,” Kriken said. “The color blue represents the male; hence the title, ‘Baby Blue.’”

Kriken “is an honest voice for many soldiers who have been so broken by their experiences that many of them cannot communicate their ordeals to others,” Mimi Both, a sculpture student who toured the exhibit, said.  ”He respectifully honors the sacrifices they have made and empathizes with them. Whether the viewer is an antiwar activist or one who glorifies war, I believe that Kriken his skillfully bridges the gap so that this merging of respectful honesty can be highly appreciated by most individuals. ”

For more info on Rolf Kriken’s work, go to his website, email him at nordhammer@mchsi.com, or call 707-489-0067.

Michael “Machine Gun” Kelley, a nationally renowned Vietnam veteran artist and writer, died December 24 at his home in Sacramento, California. He committed suicide. Kelley was 65 years old and had been suffering from physical and emotional problems for several years.

“Mike Kelley was a force of nature,” said Marc Leepson, The VVA Veteran’s Arts Editor. “He was severely wounded in Vietnam, but through drive and determination he recovered and became a first-class artist and a forceful writer.

“And he was an untiring advocate for Vietnam veterans. Mike’s legacy will be the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which he helped get built, and his Where We Were in Vietnam, the invaluable book he worked tirelessly on for many years and one that belongs on every shelf of Vietnam War reference books.”

Michael P. Kelley was born in Van Nuys, California, and grew up in Montreal and Sacramento. He graduated from California State University, Sacramento, with a degree in fine art. After receiving his degree, Kelley volunteered for the draft. He was inducted on June 10, 1969, had Basic Training and Infantry AIT at Fort Ord, and landed in Vietnam on November 10, 1969.

Kelley did an eleven-month Vietnam War tour as a machine-gunner with Company D, 1st Battalion/502nd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. His tour ended in September 1970 when Kelley suffered severe injuries—including the loss of a lung—in a landmine explosion.

He was medivaced to Japan, then spent eight months recovering at Letterman Army Medical Center in San Francisco. Kelly was retired on medical disability in May of 1971.

Sometimes calling himself  “Machine-gun Kelley,” he went back to college and received his Masters in Fine Arts. Beginning in the early 1980s, Kelley became one of California’s most forceful and effective Vietnam veterans’ advocates. Among other things, he served as an Associate Member of the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission from 1984-1991. He donated his print “Extraction From a Hot LZ- Leaving Behind a Classic Ford and Our Innocence” (above, top) to the Commission, which used it as a fund-raising poster.

Mike Kelley’s artwork hangs in museums and private collections throughout the world, including at Vietnam Veterans of America’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland; the Oakland Museum of California; and the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago.

His articles on Vietnam veterans’ issues appeared in The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, and Vietnam Magazine, among other publications.  Where We Were was published in 2002.

“Mike Kelley has done everyone who served in Vietnam a great service with his monumental research for Where We Were,” the noted Vietnam War correspondent Joe Galloway said of the book. “Veterans and military historians alike will benefit from his Herculean efforts to nail down precisely where everything was and where everything happened in America’s long war in Vietnam. If you can’t find it in these pages, it can’t be found.”

A memorial service was held on January 15 in a most appropriate location, the California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento’s Capitol Park in front of the State Capitol. Contributions to the Michael P. Kelley memorial fund can be sent to 1617 Porter Way,  Stockton, CA 95207

For info, call 209- 403-6303

“Fly Marines! The Centennial of Marine Corps Aviation: 1912-2012″ is the name of a new exhibit that opened on January 14 at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The exhibit is made up of 91 works of art—mostly depicting Marine Corps aviation subjects— selected from the Marine Corps Art Program, which began in 1942 during World War II to “keep Americans informed about what ‘their Marines’ were doing at home and overseas.”

Included in the Smithsonian exhibit are several works from the Vietnam War, such as a still life of a bullet-riddled helicopter pilot’s seat and a painting by LCPL James Butcher of a Marine sitting alone waiting for a flight at the air terminal at Phu Bai in 1967.

The entire Marine Corps art collection is made up of  more than 8,000 works. It is housed at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, and  worked with the Air and Space Museum to produce the exhibition.

“If you come here today looking for pretty airplane pictures, you are going to be hard pressed to find but a couple of those,” Lin Ezell, the director of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, told The Washington Post. “The show is a celebration not about the form of the aircraft itself, but the function of aircraft in war, and that always has to do with people.”

This exhibit will be on display for a year. For info on the museum’s hours of operation, go to Air and Space’s web site.

Vann Nath, one of Cambodia’s most promient artists, died of cardiac arrest on September 5. He was 65 years old and was one of a handful of survivors (only two of whom are alive today) of the notorious Khmer Rouge secret prison and torture center known as Tuol Sleng (or S-21), where some 14,000 men, women, and children were interrogated, tortured and executed during the 1975-79 Killing Fields that followed the end of the American War in Vietnam.

Vann Nath’s artistic skill and renown, in fact, saved him from being executed. The Khmer Rouge jailors spared him and put him to work painting and sculpting portraits of their leader, the notorious Pol Pot. Vann Nath escaped from S-21 in 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and liberated many of the Killing Field prisons.

The prison later became a genocide museum whereVann Nath worked for several years.  His paintings depicting the brutality he saw in S-21 hang in the museum today. Among his other artistic endeavors, Vann Nath worked with Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh on the documentary, “The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” and wrote a memoir, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 Prison in 1998.