Provided by Hylton Performing Arts Center
Beginning Sept. 15, In Her Image, a new exhibition showcasing the art of former and active-duty women Servicemembers will be on display at the Buchanan Partners Art Gallery. The showcased pieces, which include a variety of mediums, including ceramic, stained glass, photography, and fabric, explore the meaning of service and challenge the male-dominated narratives that have often overlooked women’s contributions to military history.
The exhibition’s contributors represent a wide cross-section of military service who have served in different roles, different eras, and represented ranks “from senior officer to enlisted,” said the exhibition’s curator Steven Luu, an artist and Air Force Veteran who recently received his MFA from George Mason University. Each artist’s experience is different, he noted, but the stories their works tell are “very profound.”
Fiber art by Kathryn “Cricket” Tate
Fiber artist Kathryn “Cricket” Tate, a retired U.S. Air Force Colonel, uses her artwork as a way of understanding and honoring her family’s long history of military service. Her pieces History and Rise weave together parachute silk received from her grandfather and fabric from flight suits worn by her father in Vietnam and Korea, along with fatigues and battle dress uniforms worn by both her and her husband. The weaving, which she took up when she retired from service, functions as an act of preservation: “I feel like once we take off the uniform our lived experience becomes lost to the fabric of time. By transforming uniforms into art, I hope to help those that served remember their legacy lives on.”
Christina Cooper also has deep ties to the military. A self-described “military brat,” and a former U.S. Army nurse, Cooper tended wounded Marines in Afghanistan, an experience that inspired her work River City Poem. She is part of “a family with a history of service to this country,” she said. “It’s very much who we are and how we live our lives. The art I create is just a reflection of that.”
In Her Image reflects patriotism and pride, but the exhibition also delves into more complicated emotional territory. Active-duty Servicemembers have constraints placed on their political expression and this self-censorship isn’t always easy, but it is “imperative to the survival of our country” says Sergeant Major Leigh Lafosse, a clarinetist for The U.S. Army Band’s “Pershing’s Own,” whose stained glass and hammer piece The Waiting appears in the exhibition. For her, creating art serves as an important outlet for self-expression.
Photographer and former U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer Laura Hatcher uses her work to increase visibility for her fellow Servicemembers and to address frustration that followed the Pentagon’s disbanding of the 70-year-old Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) last year. She says, “As with most negative headlines, it’s easy to get caught up in the emotional side of an argument. Instead I chose to use facts, my photography (self-portrait), and platform to educate others on what DACOWITS really embodied.”
Psychological Armor by Margaret Mahan
Luu stresses that the support provided by military family members—and the burdens they shoulder—should also be recognized. In Her Image includes the work of Michelle Smith, the surviving spouse of Nicholas Eric Smith, who served as an aviation machinist’s mate for the U.S. Navy. Smith’s two ceramic sculptures, Widow: as wife and Widow: as mother are the product, she said, of “an effort to express the complex emotions surrounding the sudden loss of my husband” and the “chasm” that can develop from having one foot in the military world and the other in the civilian world. Its inclusion is a reminder that sacrifices are not just made by those serving on the front lines.
Hatcher, Cooper, and LaFosse are among the 11 artists who will be participating in a panel discussion on Sept. 26. In Her Image will be on display through Oct. 31. Learn more about this exhibition and other exhibitions coming to the Buchanan Partners Arts Gallery.
