RESISTING THE LONG WAR: A Revolution of Values

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. —Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” 1967

In the May 1967 issue of Ramparts Magazine, Martin Luther King, Jr. published a condensed version of his searing “Beyond Vietnam” speech under the title "Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam." In it he named militarism, materialism, and racism as the “giant triplets” threatening American democracy and called for a “revolution of values.”

Just days later, Dr. King led a march to the United Nations during which, for the first time, a group of Vietnam veterans marched under a banner declaring Vietnam Veterans Against the War. This public act of defiance marked the birth of one of the most radical anti-war organizations in US history, demonstrating that those trained for war could become some of its fiercest opponents.

A Revolution of Values traces this lineage of resistance through the work of veteran artists who have turned away from militarism and toward solidarity. The exhibition includes ceramics, sculpture, papermaking, printmaking, photography, poetry and other forms that show the range of ways veteran artists examine their military experiences and critique militarism across generations.

Featured artists include: Drew Cameron, Brittney Chantele Aston, Rodney Ewing, Eric J. Garcia, GOODW.Y.N., Gina Herrera (Costa Rican and Tesuque Pueblo), Nathan Lewis, Eric Perez, Gerald Euhon Sheffield II, Ehren Tool, Yiran Zhang, and archival materials from Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

A Revolution of Values claims and centers this lineage of resistance to celebrate the way veteran artists turn from militarism towards solidarity, exemplifying the “revolution of values” Dr. King called for. The exhibition highlights the vast array of creative processes veteran artists use across generations to express this radical turn.

A Revolution of Values is one of the four featured exhibitions of the 2026 Veteran Art Triennial, RESISTING THE LONG WAR curated by Aaron Hughes, Mohamed Mehdi, and Amber Zora. The Triennial highlights artists’ creative defiance to war and militarism. The featured artworks lift up overlapping legacies of war resistance, presenting alternative visions of peace, healing, and justice generated by diverse communities impacted by war.

Additional featured exhibitions will be at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and Walls Turned Sideway. Exhibition receptions will take place during the Veteran Art Summit November 5-8, 2026.

This exhibition is supported in part by the DEMIL Art Fund and

Veterans and active military members always receive free admission to EAM.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Brittney Chantele Aston [US Army veteran] (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist working across film, painting, ceramics, music, and performance. A disabled US Army veteran, their work draws from lived experience to examine endurance, repetition, and what the body carries long after leaving institutional systems. Through material transformation and embodied practice, Aston challenges ideas of strength, control, and productivity, exploring what the body is asked to carry, and what it refuses. Aston earned their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where their practice expanded across performance, moving image, and material-based work.

Drew Cameron [US Army veteran] (he/him) renders military uniforms into paper. Through workshops and events, he brings the public together to make their own sheets of paper, often creating works from within the ranks of those actively and formerly in the US military. A former soldier and Iraq war veteran (US Army 2003), Cameron presents and facilitates his papermaking studio and technique in creative spaces from coast to coast. He has been teaching and working as Combat Paper® throughout the years of the most recent American wars. Cameron’s work has been presented regularly in workshop events and exhibitions in the US and internationally. His books and print editions are in public collections and libraries throughout the country including the Library of Congress. He maintains his paper studio and resides in Iowa City, Iowa. Rodney Ewing [US Army veteran] (he/him) is a visual artist, whose drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact, and to re- examine human histories, and cultural conditions. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Jack Shainman Gallery: The School, The Drawing Center in NY, The Brooklyn Museum, and Rena Bransten Gallery. Ewing is a grantee of the Pollock Krasner award (2022-2023) San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant (2016 and 2020) and his work has been included in the collection of Tufts University Art Gallery and SFMOMA.

Eric J. Garcia [US Air Force veteran] (he/him) uses history and a graphic style to create political art that confronts our understanding of the present. Using printmaking, drawings, and installations combined with meaningful materials to the project, he aims to educate and challenge. He received his BFA with a minor in Chicano studies from the University of New Mexico, and earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Garcia is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, a core member of the printmaking collective, Instituto Gráfico de Chicago and one of the newest members of the Justseeds Print Cooperative. Garcia has exhibited nationally and can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Library of Congress.

Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. [US Army veteran] (they/them) was longlisted for The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2023, the 2023 RWW Creative Nonfiction Fellow, as well as the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, while advancing to the 2nd Round of the 2018 Creative Capital Awards. They published the articles “Talking with My Daughter…” and “Why is this Happening in Your Life…” in the New York Times’ parentblog Motherlode. Additionally, their work “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Poems,” was longlisted for The Black Spring Press Group’s The Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize for 2020.

Gina Herrera [US Army veteran] (she/her) was raised in Chicago and resides in California. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the course of her studies, she was deployed overseas in support of several war contingencies with the United States Army. Once her final tour was complete, she obtained her Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her art practice has centered on creating assemblages from found materials, metal, and ceramics which reflect her veteran identity and Tesuque Pueblo and Costa Rican heritage. Notable achievements include a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship and numerous residencies. Herrera served in the military for almost 25 years, and recently retired from 22 years of teaching art at the high school and college level. She looks forward to devoting more concentrated energy on art in the next phase of her career.

Nathan Lewis [US Army veteran] (he/him) is an arborist and U.S Army veteran who served in Iraq in 2003. An accomplished papermaker and bookmaker, Lewis’s artwork is held in university and museum collections around the country, as well as the Library of Congress. He has appeared in the films The Green Zone (2010) and This is Not A War Story (2021). The author of three books of poetry about his war experience, he continues to collaborate with other veterans, activists and artists.

Eric Perez [US Marine Corps veteran] (he/him) is a Chicago-based artist and educator whose work explores memory, identity, and lived experience through photography. A Marine Corps veteran, his practice often reflects on his two deployments during the Global War on Terror, using the camera as a tool for processing and storytelling. As Project Manager for Floating Museum, Perez applies his skills in photography and videography to document the collective’s large-scale, community-driven projects. He also leads a team responsible for the production and citywide presentation of Floating Museum’s Floating Monuments series. Perez earned his Associate of Arts degree from Triton College (2016) and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2019). Upon graduation, he participated in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s Launch Residency (2019) and was later named a National Endowment for the Humanities Veteran Fellow (2022) with the emerging Veterans Art Movement (eVAM). In 2023, he received the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award and Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, Dock 6, UIC’s BFA Thesis Exhibition (2019), and Triton College Art Gallery.

Gerald Euhon Sheffield II [US Army veteran] (he/him) is an artist and educator living and working in the Hudson Valley, New York. His studio practice centers on critical, site-specific research, painting, and sculpture. Sheffield served eight years in the U.S. Army as a Visual Communications and Military Intelligence Public Affairs specialist, with postings in Paraguay, Guatemala, Brazil, and Kuwait, and a deployment to Baghdad (2007–2008) collaborating with Iraqi civilians and community leaders during reconstruction. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University. His awards include the United States Armed Forces Meritorious Service Medal, the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, the JUNCTURE Human Rights Research and Travel Fellowship, and a US Fulbright to Uzbekistan (2019). He was a 2022–2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Veteran Fellow and is currently a visiting lecturer at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He continues exhibiting regionally and internationally.

Ehren Tool [US Marine Corps veteran] (he/him) has made and given away more than 27,000 cups since 2001. He is a Marine Corps Veteran of the 1991 Gulf War. Tool received his BFA from USC in 2000 and his MFA from UC Berkeley in 2005, where he has worked as a Senior Mechanician since graduation.

Yiran Zhang [Singapore Armed Forces veteran] (he/him) is a Singaporean artist based in London, UK, whose research-driven practice interrogates militaristic systems and the hidden logics embedded within them. Drawing on his experience of compulsory military service in Singapore, Zhang examines the contradictions between protection and threat, repurposing military imagery and historical relics to reveal how this tension sustains control while normalizing and desensitizing exposure to conflict. His practice is grounded in archival research and often responds to the layered histories of the sites in which it is shown, taking form across installation, sculpture, printmaking, and projection. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London.