War and Disbelief: An Interview with Veteran Artist Gerald Sheffield
This interview was adapted and edited for length and clarity from an interview originally done in fall 2022.
Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Foreground: Gerald Sheffield, fm 3-05.301 (from ptsd series), 2016. Background: let’s teach them baseball i, 2023. Photo by Eric Perez.
Spencer Harrison (SH): The themes of intimacy, resiliency, and solidarity are central to the curatorial frame of the Surviving the Long Wars Triennial. Why are they important to you and how do they impact your creative work?
Gerald Sheffield (GS): Intimacy, resiliency, and solidarity are dynamic elements of cultural engagement. Solidarity runs throughout my studio discipline. My first military assignment was an early influence for these themes in my creative practice. Prior to enlisting in the US Army, I was a seventeen-year-old homeless teenager who never left the city limits of Atlanta. My first assignment was in Paraguay. I overcame challenges such as learning to speak Spanish and learning the cultural history of its indigenous people. I was trained in US Army Special Operations to recognize and mimic behavior patterns and customs as a strategy for cultural immersion, which helped me learn the language and understand the people and their culture. I would also make comparisons between the urban environment in Paraguay and where I grew up in Atlanta—the loud hip-hop music blasting from car radios or out of apartment windows, the fashion and women’s beauty standards, as well as general attitudes of the city. I realized that the US was not the center of the world, which made space for other perspectives.
SH: How do your experiences differ from the dominant nationalist veteran identity, and how do they shed light on the tangled relationships of race, citizenship, and military service?
GS: In grad school, I had a crisis of identity. People placed low expectations on my art because I was a veteran. Because of that I made an intentional effort to avoid making “military art” and focused on the complexity of racial representation within painting. I had compartmentalized my identity into three categories: Black person, US citizen, and US Army Iraq War veteran.
In rural areas of this country, I identify as a US Army veteran, and I’m most comfortable with my Black identity when I’m around other Black people. In my art, I work with my various identities by using anecdotal representations of the tensions between racial and national identity. I could not suppress my veteran identity, and I began to critique militarized US occupation within developing countries.
My cultural exchanges abroad reshaped my perspective on the US. When abroad, there’s a fundamental level of respect I receive because of my US citizenship. People I meet usually defer to my understanding of various concepts in ways that I recognize typically only benefit educated white people in the US.
Between leaving the military and enrolling at Yale University for grad school, a national discourse was starting to develop regarding the role of police officers and armed vigilantes within Black and Brown working-class communities. Many of my peers thought I should be solely focusing on issues of race in the US.
The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 was one of the first instances where I saw police equipped with the same military-grade equipment we used throughout my combat tour in Iraq. It was also the first time I was a spectator to this level of confrontation between state and civilian actors outside of my active duty military service. My superiors in the military assured me that, constitutionally, no such military action was permitted on US soil, so this was an eye-opening experience. The national news coverage, including the community protests and the overwhelming police presence turned the tragedy into a violent spectacle. I started drawing visual comparisons between victims of domestic police violence and the innocent, yet seemingly nameless, casualties of war.
Gerald Sheffield, untitled (iraqi body count), 2019. Video still of 13-minute video. Image courtesy of the artist.
In response to this experience, I created a 13-minute video installation titled iraqi body count, which features a pair of numbers side by side counting up from zero. Each minute in the video represents an estimated number of casualties per year, from 2003 to 2016. As the video nears the end of its loop, one of the counters stops around 4,500, which represents the number of US service member combatant casualties in the Iraq war. The adjacent number in the video continues rising over 180,000, representing the continuation of innocent civilian casualties into the present. The goal of this video installation is to draw attention to the overwhelming disparity of who we as a nation recognize as victims of militarized violence. But I also wanted to counter the proliferation of images of dead bodies that I felt had become too common in US society. As a result, I used the numbers of casualties to abstractly represent violence and death.
Gerald Sheffield, fm 3-05.301 (from ptsd series), 2016. Wheatpaste-collaged copy paper on panel. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Photo by Eric Perez.
SH: Can you say more about your experience challenging norms and expectations around identity?
GS: A question that my professors would often ask was, “What does your Black identity have to do with being a veteran, and how does that relate to your art?” The image I had of a veteran was a white, male veteran. In the US, it’s ingrained in us by films like those that came out in the early 2000s, like Jarhead or The Hurt Locker—the protagonist is always a working class, white male. But there were all these people I knew that did not fit that stereotype: my dad served in the Navy, my granddad served in the Army in the Korean War, but it’s something they just don’t talk about. It’s almost as if they didn’t even serve. These are the BIPOC veteran artists’ stories that you just don't often hear. Including them gives a broader understanding of the conflict and the struggles people deal with in their service.
Gerald Sheffield, building Dreamland, or Camp Baharia, Fallujah, Iraq, 2018. Acrylic on panel. 8 x 10 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
SH: How do you see your creative work fitting into the Triennial as a whole and in relation to the other artists?
GS: We’re all living under the same colonial structure. “We,” including my BIPOC veteran artist cohort and communities of colonial diaspora, are all responding to similar constructs regarding representation and the specific form of sovereignty within the historical legacy of western colonialism. We’re all fighting the same structural system from different perspectives, and I’m pulling the materials and forms that look similar regardless of the vantage point.
My artistic intentions are based in recognizing quotidian structures of colonialism in reference to any military experience. The US military represents an important and violent extension of US foreign policy, and it’s important to represent the nuances of that colonial violence. It’s often mundane or ubiquitous, and the colonial structure benefits from hiding within the everyday—a wall, a room, a doorway, or a document—structures and materials we take for granted yet represent forms of access or denial, imprisonment or torture, and in many cases death.
Gerald Sheffield, let’s teach them baseball i, 2023 (based on a 2017 installation). Drywall, plywood studs, vinyl, tension wire, charcoal, latex paint. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Photo by Eric Perez.
SH: In 2017 you presented a previous version of the art installation let’s teach them baseball i, which you showed in the 2023 Triennial. Why did you choose to bring back the arches from Saddam’s palace for Surviving the Long Wars?
GS: It was originally an institutional critique of selling a painting about a mostly forgotten war. I was uncomfortable with creating a body of work that could be easily packaged and sold for a commission—it isn’t owned by anyone. A painting for sale has to be a beautiful object, and this project was countering consumption and those beauty aesthetics. It was not a “classically beautiful piece.” It was rugged and had paint chipping off, which was a result of me dragging the piece into the gallery. So it became an experience which echoes the experience of going through war and bringing all the scars and baggage that come with it. A kind of performance–an embodied practice.
My process is “failing forward” with a lot of mistakes. A bunch of ideas and materials get shredded throughout the process. Part of that is my inability as an artist, lack of resources, running out of time, or things just not going as planned. That is all part of my embodied practice of resilience and struggle. And in the context of making art, I think this particular form of failure can be poetic and offer a productive point of interest for the viewer to explore and ask further questions.
Gerald Sheffield, let’s teach them baseball i, 2023 (based on a 2017 installation). Drywall, plywood studs, vinyl, tension wire, charcoal, latex paint. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Photo by Eric Perez.
When I first presented let’s teach them baseball ii, it was right after Donald Trump was elected president, and that overshadowed some of my intentions. Whereas now, on the twentieth anniversary of the War in Iraq, and as part of the Triennial and Summit, we’re talking directly about the Global War on Terror and the connection to the “Indian Wars” and foundations of US hegemony.
I’ve spent the past ten years talking about the war to a brick wall—to people who don’t care. There were people in my graduate school who would ask, “Is this a war or a conflict?” Or, “Are we even at war?” I was baffled by these questions. How could people not know? But, with the Triennial, I finally had a second chance, an opportunity to use my strongest pieces from that period to address these questions and their all-but-forgotten historical roots.
Gerald Sheffield, let’s teach them baseball i, 2023 (based on a 2017 installation). Drywall, plywood studs, vinyl, tension wire, charcoal, latex paint. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Photo by Eric Perez.
Gerald Sheffield, Al Faw Palace II, 2017. Flashe on panel. 12 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.
Gerald Euhon Sheffield II is an artist and educator living and working in Poughkeepsie, NY. His studio discipline is based in critical and site-specific research, painting, and sculpture. Sheffield’s professional background consists of a diversity of institutions and collaborations across borders. He served in the United States Army for eight years as a Visual Communications and Military Intelligence Public Affairs Specialist in Paraguay, Guatemala, Brazil, and Kuwait. He deployed to Baghdad, Iraq (2007–2008), working alongside Iraqi civilians and community leaders during the Iraqi Reconstruction Campaign. He received a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the United States Armed Forces Meritorious Service Medal, the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship, the JUNCTURE Human Rights Research and Travel Fellowship, and the US Fulbright to Uzbekistan (2019). He is a 2022–2023 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Veteran Fellow.
Spencer Harrison completed his MA in English from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023. During the 2022–2023 academic year he conducted this interview while in the Surviving the Long Wars seminar class in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program and Gender and Women’s Studies program at University of Illinois Chicago.