The 2026 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, RESISTING THE LONG WAR, 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.
Summit: Day 1
Thursday, November 5, 2026
Elmhurst Art Museum
Refreshments and non-alcoholic drinks will be served.
Elmhurst Art Museum • 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Join us for the opening reception and welcome to the 2026 Veteran Art Summit, featuring an evening of art, performance, poetry, and conversation.
Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Refreshments will be served.
Join us for an Aztec dance performance featuring Xochitl-Quetzal Danza Azteca and Veteran Fellow Rocio Villanueva. The performance brings together traditional movement, and contemporary practice.
A guided introduction to A Revolution of Values, including remarks from the curatorial team.
Image Courtesy of Elmhurst Art Museum, Photo by Siegfried Mueller
The program will conclude with words and poetry from Shaymaa Khalil, Operations Director of the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project, and Nathan Lewis, exhibiting artist at Elmhurst Art Museum, among others.
An interactive session for makers and thinkers to collaborate, connect, and spark new ideas.
Drawing on Art, Harm, and Healing, a statement written by the Humans of Life Row collective, a group of men serving life sentences in Illinois. Workshop participants are invited to consider how veterans might develop a collective statement of their own, grounded in their experiences, values, and visions for healing and transformation.
Lisa Mannion, aka Ukulady Lisa, is an Army combat veteran, singer-songwriter, Chicago musician, and music teacher, passionate about veterans' mental health and the healing power of music.
A former vocalist and paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division’s All-American Chorus, Lisa performed worldwide from Afghanistan to France for the 75th D-Day Anniversary, as well as Walt Disney World, Daytona 500, and more.
A hands-on printmaking workshop with John Hitchcock. Registration required.
The Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP), in partnership with Resisting The Long War, invite you to Kleicha: A Taste of Return inspired by Yusser Salih's Intention of Return/Relatives of Estrangement نية العودة, an effort to turn the gharb (related to distantness, remoteness) into qorb (related to nearness).
Guests will get to experiment with different book binding techniques and make their own journals with handmade paper from military uniforms.
Moderated by Angela Waller, this writing workshop invites participants to reflect on themes of war, resistance, freedom, and the experiences of those impacted by militarism through guided writing and discussion.
Lovella Calica leads an introductory community health workshop focused on Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), a series of movement-based exercises designed to help the body release muscular tension and stress.
Dorothy I. Burge will lead an all-levels quilting workshop that begins with an introduction to the history and cultural significance of quilting within the Black community. Guests will be invited to collaborate on a community quilt about Black veterans.
Join Cog•nate Collective in activating their new installation ¡Animo! (Abre Caminos / Let Us Shift).
Open Platform is an opportunity for veterans, war-impacted artists, and community members to share and learn about the wide range of art practices and projects currently happening.
In this creative writing workshop, participants will be encouraged to move throughout the Triennial exhibits at Hyde Park Art Center, writing to prompts that will help them draw a deeper connection to the artworks on display.
The evening begins with a guided tour of Shifting Horizons at Hyde Park Art Center led by the curatorial team, followed by a night of live music and DJ sets.
Summit: Day 2
Friday, November 6, 2026
Hyde Park Art Center
Coffee, Registration, and Check-in
Hyde Park Art Center • 10:00 am – 9:00 pm CST
Summit: Day 3
Saturday, November 7, 2026
Hyde Park Art Center & Walls Turned Sideways
Coffee, Registration, and Check-in
Hyde Park Art Center • 10:00 am – 4:00 pm CST
Walls Turned Sideways • 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm CST
Begin the day with a guided grounding practice designed to bring participants together and create space for reflection, connection, and presence.
Steeped in Stillness is an immersive sound scape.
Step away from the pace of the day and give yourself permission to pause. Steeped in Stillness is an immersive sound bath blending guided meditation, deep rest, reflection, and journaling. Together, we’ll slow down, settle into the present moment, and make space to notice what rises when we allow ourselves to become still.
What to Bring: A yoga mat, "journal", something to write with, and anything that helps you feel supported, cozy and comfortable.
Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (Next Page Press, 2024), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children (Eyewear Publishing, 2018), and The Riddle of Longing (Backbone Press, 2017; updated edition forthcoming from Bull City Press). He teaches high school English in Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University's School of Professional Studies. He is also a visual artist.
Mahwish Chishty leads a collaborative, community-based workshop exploring the emotional and societal impact of modern warfare in the United States.
Photograph by Stephen Petegorsky
From workshops to community gatherings, here's what we have coming up. Mark your calendar—we'd love to see you there.
Open Platform is an opportunity for veterans, war-impacted artists, and community members to share and learn about the wide range of art practices and projects currently happening.
Hanaa Malallah’s The Daffodils reads Gertrude Bell’s letters from British-occupied Baghdad against the artist’s own journey from Iraq to Britain a century later. Kiersten Neumann—Curator of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum, Research Associate at ISAC, and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Chicago—discusses her collaboration on this project with Malallah, and a curatorial practice that centers artists of Middle Eastern heritage, drawing on archaeological collections, many displaced by colonial-era excavation, in support of their work.
Join artist Gene Swallow (Oglala Lakota) for a hands-on doll-making workshop. Designed as an extended workshop session, participants will have time to learn techniques, work with materials, and create their own dolls.
Hanaa Malallah’s The Daffodils reads Gertrude Bell’s letters from British-occupied Baghdad against the artist’s own journey from Iraq to Britain a century later. Kiersten Neumann—Curator of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum, Research Associate at ISAC, and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Chicago—discusses her collaboration on this project with Malallah, and a curatorial practice that centers artists of Middle Eastern heritage, drawing on archaeological collections, many displaced by colonial-era excavation, in support of their work.
The evening continues at Walls Turned Sideways with a gallery tour and program.
Organized with incarcerated veteran artists, War Abolition foregrounds visions of freedom, refusal, and collective survival that emerge from within the carceral state. The exhibition begins from a core abolitionist insight: prisons are not separate from war, nor merely analogous to it, but part of the domestic infrastructure through which militarized violence is organized, racialized, and sustained.
Summit: Day 4
Sunday, November 8, 2026
Chicago Cultural Center
Coffee, Registration, and Check-in
Chicago Cultural Center - Grand Army of the Republic Hall • 10:00 am – 5:00 pm CST
The final day of the summit begins with a welcome gathering in the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) Hall, followed by a performance by Charlie Reynolds and a reflection circle inviting participants to pause, process, and share as a community.
Contribute to artist Sabba S. Elahi's embroidery project to memorialize the names of children—who were killed by US drone attacks in Pakistan.
A hands-on workshop with artist and organizer Josh MacPhee, inviting participants to engage with his Lexicon of International Antimilitarist Graphics and Icons Against Militarism.
Exhibition walkthrough and discussion with artist Dorothy I. Burge for her solo show Freedom Fighters at the Grand Army of the Republic Hall.
Moderated by Miranda Roberts (Yerington Paiute/Chicana), this panel, part of Resisting the Long Wars, the 2026 Veteran Art Triennial, asks how artists reclaim imposed narratives through their practice, building counter-memory, forging solidarity across divided histories, and mobilizing us against the everyday structures of warfare: policing, prisons, borders, and occupation.
black pit (work-in-progress) is a new performance* work in progress conceptually linking the ring shout, mosh pit, and crowdsourced archive to suppose the anarchic potentiality of coming together in spiral time. In other words, black pit is busy with the ways black formations--and formations within formations--occur, and what they might tell us about black sociality within the purview of the state. Beginning with the 2023 Montgomery, AL Boat Dock Brawl whose filming went viral, an ensemble of dancers work through the brawl's gestures as portal-opening technology, and its anarchy, care, violence, and mass serve as framing conventions. Re- and de-contextualizing a panoply of movement phrases arising from drills, martial arts, and performances of sacred spiraling, and using improvisation to set and re-set the Brawl as a series of scores and movement grammars, we consider uprising as form.
This presentation is a work-in-progress for a larger project that will premiere in 2028. The VAT iteration is devised and activated by Rahila Coats, Makini, Jeremy Guyton, keyon gaskin, Solmon Bowser, and Marguerite Hemmings. black pit is conceived and choreographed by Anna Martine Whitehead.
Photo by Melika Bass
Beyond Vietnam, a Walking Meditation, led by Patricia Nguyen, is an interactive meditation that begins with a talk and tea ceremony and concludes with a collective walk. The first part of the meditation will focus on a short talk about the friendship and anti-war peace efforts of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. During the tea ceremony, participants will share reflections on war and peace. We will end with a walking meditation from the Chicago Cultural Center to the Sheraton Hotel, where the two leading figures first met in Chicago in 1966. The first part of the title draws on Dr. King Jr.'s speech "Beyond Vietnam," which called for an end to the American War in Vietnam and linked the civil rights movement's struggle against racism to militarism abroad. The second part, "a walking meditation" is inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh's accessible Buddhist meditation practice, which was developed in the midst of war and centers on the importance of grounding one's practice of mindfulness to cultivate social transformation.