Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine Opening Program

Forging Hope is the opening program for the Triennial exhibition Reckon and Reimagine at Chicago Cultural Center’s Exhibition Hall and Theater. The program will begin with an exhibition walkthrough with featured artists and concludes with a music performances by Brittney Chantele. Influenced by their personal experiences, Chantele utilizes the art of hip-hop, a genre with a history of social and political activism.

Brittney Chantele [US Army veteran] is a dynamic pop/hip hop artist and DJ on the rise. Chantele’s music focuses on their military experience, queer identity, and relationship experiences through a refreshingly honest lens. As a biracial, non-binary, lesbian artist, Chantele is committed to creating a world where Queer people and Queer love aren’t just seen, but fully represented and respected.

Reckon and Reimagine is one of the three featured exhibitions of the second Veteran Art Triennial, SURVIVING THE LONG WARS. The other exhibitions include Unlikely Entanglements at the Hyde Park Art Center and Residues and Rebellions at the Newberry Library.

SURVIVING THE LONG WARS: Reckon and Reimagine features the powerful work of Indigenous artists responding to the “American Indian Wars” alongside artists from the Greater Middle East and its diasporas reacting to the “Global War on Terror.” The exhibition explores how these works complicate and relate to the creative practices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) veterans whose experiences profoundly challenge the dominant histories of these long wars.

Collectively, these works begin to reckon with an ongoing violent history while creating space to build solidarity across difference. Unlikely connections emerge as the artists use diverse strategies to construct meaning out of the ruins of the long wars. They critique dominant colonial conventions and propose dissident people’s archives, while reworking the complex terrain of public monuments and memorials through the perspective of diverse BIPOC communities. By reckoning with these complex legacies the featured contemporary artists transform colonial materials and technologies to reimagine histories and futures.