Many military veterans call San Antonio home, settling in the city after their service. Not all recall their time in the military with pride.
Some veterans have adopted views against war and common military practices, joining groups such as the About Face veterans anti-war advocacy organization and the Just Seeds artist collective to express their viewpoints constructively and to advocate for anti-war policies.
The Veteran Voce: A Veterans Weekend of Art, Music, and Conversation exhibition at Galeria E.V.A. running Saturday through Monday collects the artistic expressions of several veterans who have chosen to question authority and speak out against what they believe are injustices they have witnessed.
Moral injury
In 2006 when Jules Vaquera returned from six months of service in the U.S. Air Force at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, she knew all was not right.
She said it was a “brutal, horrible … place,” and afterward, “I spent two [to] three years just in complete avoidance of all things veteran, war, military generally, which is very difficult when you live in San Antonio,” known as Military City U.S.A.
Mental health struggles followed, in part due to what she termed moral injury. “By following the orders of my superiors, I did some things that violated some of my own deeply held moral values.”
A way she chose to heal from her injuries is “by fighting for justice and fighting for a world without war.”
Vaquera and others like her have processed their experiences through art and music. ”The point of making the art is 100% to heal, whatever that means for a person.”
After quickly organizing a Veteran Voce event in time for Veterans Day last year at Galeria E.V.A., this year Vaquera and a small group of veteran friends have curated a diverse range of their artworks including photographs, prints, paintings and multimedia installations. Vaquera will contribute a piece of pyrography, a form of drawing with fire on a wood surface.
War Is Trauma
Jovanni Reyes served as a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant during deployments to the Balkans, South Korea, Germany and in the U.S. He described himself as a career military person, but the runup to the Iraq war left him disillusioned.
“Once it fell apart, and it starts to get revealed that, all the pretense to get into the war was fabricated. … And no one was held accountable for that,” Reyes said he made the decision to leave the Army and join Iraq Veterans Against the War, the precursor organization to About Face.
His contribution to the Veteran Voce exhibition is War Is Trauma, a portfolio of 34 prints made in 2011 by Just Seeds, a Chicago-based printmaking group led by veteran and artist Aaron Hughes.
Reyes described himself as more of an organizer than an artist and said the idea for the Veteran Voce exhibitions arose from the 2018 exhibition Portraits of Courage, a collection of paintings by former President George W. Bush at the Witte Museum.
For several years following his presidency, Bush painted portraits of wounded veterans who’d served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars begun during his first term in office.
Reyes and other like-minded veterans objected to the exhibition and what he called the rehabilitation of Bush’s reputation. “If it wasn’t for his decision to go to war, these veterans wouldn’t be disfigured, right?” he said, but complaints to the museum went unresolved.
Reyes, Vaquera and fellow anti-war veterans Rachell and Jake Tucker gathered their artwork for their first presentation prior to the coronavirus pandemic, and all return this year with the addition of work by Regina Vasquez, Trish Simone Wild and Anthony Allevato.
The good guys
Vaquera is also a musician who performs solo and with the band The Guillotinas, which will perform live during the Saturday opening reception at 7 p.m.
The show continues through the Veterans Day holiday on Monday, with a fire ritual at 11 a.m. followed by a community conversation, then a potluck and art workshop from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and a closing reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Vaquera said the group hopes to bring a different perspective on military service to anyone who visits the show.
“In San Antonio, we thank veterans for their service. We’re very veteran-centric and military-centric,” she said. While most people think of them as “the good guys,” she said, “I don’t think we were. … If we can give them a different perspective on that, if we could deter them from actually joining the service, that would also be great.”
Admission to Galeria E.V.A. is free.