Artists
Artists
Friends
Friends
Organizers & Contributers
Organizers & Contributers
NETWORK ORGANIZERS
Aaron Hughes
Aaron Hughes is an artist, activist, organizer, teacher, and Iraq War veteran based in Chicago. His multidimensional creative practice operates in a diversity of spaces and media as he seeks out connections, poetics, and moments of beauty in order to construct narratives and meaning out of personal and collective traumas. He uses these narratives in the development of projects that expose and deconstruct systems of oppression and dehumanization. Hughes works collaboratively with a range of artists, veterans, activists, and art organizations and projects including Iraq Veterans Against the War, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, National Veterans Art Museum, Warrior Writers, Dirty Canteen, Prison & Neighborhood Arts Project, and the emerging Veteran Art Movement.
Aaron Hughes | Iraq Veterans Against the War | Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
National Veterans Art Museum | Warrior Writers | Prison & Neighborhood Arts Project
Kevin Basl
Kevin Basl is a writer, musician and activist living near Ithaca, NY. He served in the Army as a mobile radar operator from 2003 to 2008, twice deploying to Iraq. Using a variety of media to tell stories, his work focuses on the rural working class, discovering beauty in the unknown, military absurdity and futility, and learning from different cultures. He is a papermaking and printmaking instructor for Combat Paper NJ and Frontline Arts, and a writing facilitator for Warrior Writers. He earned an MFA in fiction from Temple University, where he has taught writing, and he also holds degrees in literature and philosophy. He is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace. When Kevin is not on the road teaching and performing, he lives in a solar-powered tiny house.
CONTRIBUTING INTERVIEWERS
Chelsea Wills
Chelsea Wills is an artist and food researcher. Her work exists at the nexus of place, change, and stories. This takes her to faraway places, like Mayan kitchens, crumbling haciendas, and megacity markets of Mexico, and also close to home, from the shoreline of Northern California and the last tenacious farms in the Silicon Valley to her own home garden. She explores places in flux and works closely with people inhabiting them. Her studio practice is interdisciplinary and conceptually based, choosing the right mediums and tools for each project. These can include community organizing and teaching, ethnographic research, agricultural practices, and archiving, as well as more traditional media such as photography, painting, and dyeing. She often collaborates with scientists, farmers, and cooks in her work. She draws heavily on her long-term interests in food, plants, and everyday things. Her curiosity often brings her to the margins of familiar things, the places in-between traditional and modern, wild and tame, science and art.
She co-produces the podcast Delicious Revolution. She holds a Master’s degree from UC Berkeley in Arts Education and has shown her work nationally and internationally. Currently she is an Equity Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Chelsea Wills | Delicious Revolution | One Hundred Love Letters
Thomas Seely
Thomas Seely is an audio producer and photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he was the producer and host of the podcast Art Uncovered for the arts and culture website BTR Today. The podcast featured interviews with visual artists, filmmakers, curators, and writers.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Irwing Lazo
Irwing Lazo is a writer and public school administrator living in Santa Cruz, CA. He served four years in the U.S. Marine Corps and deployed to Fallujah, Iraq as a Motor Vehicle Operator. After leaving the military, he attended college thanks to the Post 9/11 GI Bill recieving a Masters in Public Administration from San Francisco State University in 2017.