Combat Paper' exhibit showcases veterans' art as expressive outlet

After a decade marked by two prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq involving thousands of U.S. Armed Forces members, mental health issues among veterans have become an increasing problem — even though this topic is rarely at the forefront of public conversation. When returning from service, military veterans can experience a host of mental health issues, including survivor’s guilt or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder , which seriously impact their ability to reintegrate into society. The scope of this issue is evident in veteran suicide rates, which a 2012 report from the Department of Veterans Affairs estimated to be around 22 veterans a day in 2010. While there are a variety of therapies that have been utilized to help remedy these issues, the Tufts chapter of Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services has partnered with the Tufts Art Gallery to display a somewhat unconventional therapy: artwork.

“Combat Paper,” an exhibit on display in the Slater Concourse Gallery, is the culmination of a months-long process by the current executive board for ALLIES. ALLIES is an undergraduate organization that focuses on relations between civilians and the military through events like the annual Field Exercise in Peace and Stability Operations (FieldEX) simulation and joint research projects with military academies. A gallery exhibition is a decidedly different venture for the group. Sophomore and ALLIES Programming Chair Eric Halliday said that Nan Levinson, a lecturer in the Department of English, initially suggested the idea to the group. Halliday noted that in addition to kicking off a year of veterans’ issues-themed events that the group has planned, the exhibit also gave them a chance to interact with other campus groups.

“We wanted to do something like this for a while, since ALLIES is very establishment, IR [and] military focused, and this brought us in contact with other parts of campus that we don’t normally interact with on a regular basis, like the Peace and Justice Studies department and Tisch College,” he said.

Thanks to financial contributions from many groups including the Institute of Global Leadership, Tisch College, the Peace and Justice Studies department, the International Relations program and Dean Nancy Bauer’s office, ALLIES was able to host an exhibit of materials from the Combat Paper Project, an organization based in San Francisco. As described on posters in the exhibit, veterans create artwork by cutting up their military uniforms to turn them into paper pulp, which then becomes the canvas on which they paint. The Combat Paper website explains that this is part of the healing process, stating that, “participants use the transformative process of papermaking to reclaim their uniforms as art and express their experiences with the military.”

The pieces exhibited in “Combat Paper” show the various ways creating art can serve as an outlet for some of the issues veterans face upon returning home and reintegrating into civilian society. Some pieces are subdued, like “Alone,” which is merely a silhouette on a battlefield. Others are more vibrant, such as a powerful depiction of an explosion in “Napalm.” And while some veterans created art that is nondescript in nature, others used a more articulate and explicit approach. One such painting directly addresses survivor’s guilt by recreating a fallen comrade’s standard issue military ID on the canvas. Others make political statements that are open to interpretation: “We Are All Free Now” depicts an American flag comprised of Iraqi currency. The power of the exhibit is not always present in the artwork itself — instead, it often resides in the context of the veterans’ experiences themselves.

Halliday hopes that by expanding outside the usual realm of ALLIES events, the exhibit will expose more members of the Tufts community to veterans’ issues. He also emphasized that while the art-making process was not intended to be therapy in the traditional sense, it was a therapeutic outlet for veterans.

“[Veterans] can work through their issues, and, instead of verbally expressing their feelings, they can express them through art ... so it was just working through different aspects of veterans’ issues of the aftereffects of war — psychological, emotional, PTSD, survivor’s guilt — everything that veterans experience after war,” he said.

“Combat Paper” runs through Monday, Sept. 30 in the Slater Concourse Gallery. Admission is free and the exhibit is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and remains open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays.