NEWS: Bridge Books Announces New Artist’s Book Title: “Surviving The Long Wars”
NEWS
Bridge Books Announces Publication of New Artist’s Book Title: “Surviving the Long Wars”
SURVIVING THE LONG WARS WILL BE RELEASED FALL/WINTER 2024 WITH EVENTS TO BE ANNOUNCED
Bridge Books, publisher of the Bridge Journal, a division of Bridge Art Nfp, the registered Illinois 501 (c) 3 not for profit organization that also publishes the weekly online Bridge magazine at bridge-chicago.org, today announces publication of its next artist’s book title, to be released by Bridge Books in fall 2024, Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire.
Co-edited by Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora, Surviving the Long Wars offers a groundbreaking exploration into the complex histories of US warfare and militarism, illuminating the pivotal role of art in cultivating justice, healing, and abolition. This edited volume—featuring poetry, scholarly essays, exhibition documentation, and more—builds from and continues the profound impact and critical legacy of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit held in Chicago.
“We have much to learn about how questions of race, indigeneity, colonization, war, and survival are lived daily from our engagement with on-the-ground activists and artists who work with marginalized populations as well as veterans of US wars. It is not often that combat veterans get to sit down with artists and academics to think about the needs of these overlapping communities together,” says co-editor Dr. Ronak K. Kapadia. “We hope Surviving the Long Wars' emphasis on social justice and shared meaning-making about complex topics can serve as a model for others."
“Through our artwork and connections with other Indigenous communities around the world, who also continue to be exploited for the purposes of warfare, greed, and natural resources, we are able to visualize a future world where these realities are no longer viable. This publication offers an opportunity for these connections to flourish while reflecting on the injustices of the past and creating new mechanisms towards peace,” says Dr. Meranda Roberts (Northern Paiute), independent curator of Native American arts and culture and co-editor.
As Aaron Hughes, an Iraq War veteran, artist, and co-organizer of the project explains, “This publication is about the transformative power of art. It’s about the way art can create connections across differences, transform trauma into meaning, and inspire a more peaceful future.”
Bridge Books is honored to support the groundbreaking work of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, and the creative work of our veterans,” says Bridge Books publisher Michael Workman, “We hope that Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire will help educate, protect and preserve the critical practice and creative legacies of those who have experienced first hand the cost of endless militarization and war revanchism.”
About Aaron Hughes, Ronak K. Kapadia, Therese Quinn, Meranda Roberts, and Amber Zora
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 of race, war, aesthetics, and empire in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States. Currently, 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’s award-winning first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press 2019) examines the radical experiments, freedom dreams, and queer world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the ongoing context of US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. In addition to co-editing the special issue of Surveillance & Society on “race and surveillance,” Kapadia has contributed to numerous academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogs. He is at work on a new book project, Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons, which examines queer and trans migrant futurisms in visual culture and performance art to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline.
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.
View the full press release here.
