[Chicago, IL — May 31, 2025] The DEMIL Art Fund is proud to welcome three transformative artists to its 2025 cohort: Hanaa Malallah, Charlie Reynolds, and Gregory Rick. Each brings a unique voice and rigorous practice that challenges dominant narratives about war, displacement, identity, and history—deepening DEMIL’s mission to support artists dismantling militarism through creative practice.
Hanaa Malallah joins the DEMIL Art Fund with her proposed project The Daffodils: Similarities of Opposites. Through visual works, sound installation, and archival research, Malallah enters a cross-temporal dialogue with colonial figure Gertrude Bell by reinterpreting Bell’s letters from Mesopotamia. Malallah’s work addresses the contradictions of exile, empire, and memory—making visceral the relationship between past and present violence. Drawing on her "Ruins Technique," which involves burning and distressing material, Malallah's practice is shaped by her lived experience of war in Iraq and her current life in the UK as an exiled artist.
Walk out of Rubble by Hanaa Malallah, 2011. Photo by Roger Fawcett-Tang
Charlie Reynolds, a queer and disabled Navy veteran, uses fiber arts and installation to reckon with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” during his service and the personal aftermath of military trauma. Reynolds’ work reimagines military aesthetics by rendering warships, medals and military documents soft, fragile, and ambiguous—subverting the rigid structures of militarized masculinity. Through installations that merge memory, political critique, and queer identity, Reynolds opens a space for reflection, tenderness, and truth-telling. In Dress Blues, Reynolds repurposes childhood dress patterns to construct a boat, reimagining symbols of identity. This handmade vessel becomes a poignant metaphor for transition—fragile, makeshift, and in motion. It carries the weight of becoming, navigating the uncertain waters with honesty and vulnerability.
Dress Blues by Charlie Reynolds, The Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, 2025.
Gregory Rick brings a dynamic visual practice that interrogates historical violence and societal myth-making through bold, narrative-driven painting and drawing. His work collapses memory, history, and myth, placing lived experience in dialogue with a broader historical imagination. For his DEMIL-supported project, Rick will create a large-scale work on handmade paper—crafted from fibers, linters, and fragments of his personal journals. By embedding diary entries into the surface, he will repurpose intimate remnants of trauma to address larger societal issues. The piece will depict a group of service members taking the military oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies—foreign and domestic—juxtaposed with representations of those very enemies. In doing so, Rick seeks to confront the fragility of democracy and the enduring tension between integrity and corruption.
In the Shadow of the Second Amendment by Gregory Rick, 56” x 52”, 2022.
With this announcement, we begin the journey toward the 2026 Veteran Art Summit, scheduled for November next year. Stay tuned for more details to come.