Art and Service: A Q&A with Three Sam Fox School Veterans

In this interview, we’ll hear from Joe deVera, assistant professor of art and Marine Corps veteran; José Garza, MFA ’13, academic programs coordinator at the Kemper Art Museum and Navy veteran; and Roy Uptain, MFA-VA candidate and Army National Guard veteran.

Joe deVera: I served in the Marine Corps for a total of eight years, both active and reserve. I was a tank gunner and deployed twice to Iraq.

José Garza: I was enlisted personnel in the Navy for eight years. I was responsible for a system called FCS, which is basically a ship’s anti-air defense.

Roy Uptain: I was in the Army National Guard, where I served a six-year contract as a mass communications specialist. I mostly covered training exercises in the western U.S., including the Best Warrior Competition.

deVera: When I was 16, 17 years old, I was sort of a contrarian. All my friends were overachievers and going to college, and I just wanted to do something else and hopefully make some college money. Joining the Marine Corps was mostly about doing something different. There wasn’t much happening militarily in the Clinton years, in the Pax Americana stage — but we know that changed. I was in bootcamp on September 11, 2001.

Uptain: For me, it was really an economical decision. I grew up in quite a bit of poverty, and the military was one of a few options I felt like I had to get a good education and healthcare. I was going to school throughout my military career, studying painting and photography.

I’ve been judged by other people in the military, “Oh, you just wanted the benefits. Oh, you just wanted an education.” Hell yeah, I wanted an education. Hell yeah, I wanted insurance. I wanted these things that are quality of life issues, and I think that talking about the way that the military and recruiters prey on those issues is an important part of the discourse.

Garza: It was a similar reason for me — to have some financial stability. I had gone to college for art first and dropped out. I had questions about whether I was cut out for a creative field and the nonlinear path art would have. I decided to do the opposite. The military was linear, stable, something that was important to me at the time, and something my parents could understand.

Garza: I’m a first generation Mexican American and my parents are immigrants. One of the reasons they came to the U.S. was so their children could have opportunity, especially education. I have to give it to my folks, when I told them I was going to study art, they were very supportive. They were like, “we don’t know what that looks like, but you need to tell us how we can help you.” When things changed and I told them I was going into the military, I think they were relieved, because it made sense to them.

I had a pretty typical career trajectory for someone who was going to stay in the military as a lifer. I reenlisted once, and when I didn’t reenlist a second time, there were questions from my colleagues. I said that I was going back to school, that I might study electronics or engineering. I had every intention to study art, but I didn’t want to explain, because I didn’t want to waste any time justifying. I don’t feel good about it, but it saved me a lot of trouble.

Uptain: I grew up in Wyoming, which I would say is one of the last places to still hold the label of “frontier” in America. It’s heavily invested in gender roles, traditional expectations of masculinity, and acceptable career paths. When I was studying creative literature and art, that was answering the needs that I had personally, but it didn’t fit with anybody’s expectation of what I should be doing. When I joined the military, I had an experience of, “Oh, now this fits all the expectations people already had for me.”

deVera: My family was pretty open-minded. I had taken a winding path since leaving high school, and they had to trust that I knew what I was doing. After two deployments, I had great support in that they just wanted me to find something I was passionate about and had confidence in. It took me a while to figure out that studying art was a good way to gather a lot of my interests together.

deVera: The military didn’t consciously seep into my work until 2010 or 2011. Like many artists, my creativity revolves around my sense of being and identity, which includes being a veteran and an immigrant. I was really interested in sussing out the complicated things in my biography.

Compulsion is a big part of my art process, getting obsessed with something. It can be as simple as drawing the same thing over and over again, or it could be on a macro-scale, figuring out how a narrative fits into a greater cultural history.

Garza: It was halfway through my military service — something clicked, and I started thinking more like an artist. I felt like I was an artist dressed up like a sailor. Because I wasn’t open about being an artist, I would ask uncommon questions. For example, if I qualified on this operating system, is that a transferable skill to the private sector? They were like, “Oh, José’s just being José.” And I think that’s something that reinforced that art isn’t just making, it’s about conversations, engagements, experiences.

Uptain: As a mass communication specialist, I was part of a very small, very mobile team of copywriters, photographers, and videographers. I let everybody know that I was getting out and that I was planning on going to art school, which they were very interested in. I told them about the work I was preparing for my portfolio, which was a series of paintings that deeply investigated the way that photography is used in conflict to manipulate public discourse in unethical ways, turning victims of war into political talking points, stripping them of their humanity. It was a very interesting moment, because they realized that they hadn’t thought about this before. When I showed these paintings, I could see wheels start turning and these mass communications specialists — propagandists — who had been doing this for 15 years, all of a sudden started to see how they were manipulating public discourse. They started wondering if they had photographed people unethically. And that’s how I know art is effective, when it shows people a side of things that they weren’t thinking about, starts a discourse, or just asks questions that they can work answering.

Garza: That’s got me thinking — in the military, a lot of things are very straightforward and uniform. But there’s also a lot of ambiguity, and I was comfortable with that. I was studying electronics, looking at schematics, and realized I was using a lot of skills that I’d learned through my art education. That was really surprising. From there, I started transitioning to what I call my more authentic self. I realized I was still an artist. It was a very pivotal change and eventually led me to understand that I hadn’t abandoned art, it was still following me.

One of the things I understood early on was how art is a celebration of humanity, and also an interrogation of the human condition. I understood that art wasn’t just making, it was also observing the world and having an idiosyncratic view. That didn’t fit within the military. For me, it reinforced that living as an artist has allowed me a lot of freedoms. In my studio, I get to decide everything. In my research, I get to decide what is of interest to me, what I find compelling, and what I can share with others. Even when I was young, I was seeking that freedom to choose, to make, to explore.

Uptain: I think that another important part of my experience was this unstable identity, or feeling like you’re in the role of somebody that doesn’t quite fit you. Not only was I feeling like I was like an artist and a creative in a uniform, but Guard soldiers are sometimes called “weekend warriors,” implying that they’re not real soldiers. I had this double layer of pretending, of questioning constantly, “Am I legitimate? Am I authentic? Am I fulfilling enough expectations to be taken seriously or to be credible?” And I think that those are interesting questions that come up in our everyday lives. How much are you playing a role? How convincing is that role? What lengths are you willing to go to convince people of that role?

Working in this propaganda role, I understood how external expectations are built and maintained over time. That allowed me to come back around to this artistic lens where I was shaping people’s perceptions in ways they’re unconscious of. I can do something with that, whether it’s shedding light on these histories of public opinion manipulation or taking the artistic plunge and shaping my own creative world, convincing people of my own artistic vision that doesn’t align with these expectations.

Uptain: For somebody who is in the military and who has creative pursuits, I would encourage them to use those pursuits as an opportunity to explore gray areas of contradiction or paradox, where you’re like, “Hmm, this doesn’t seem to align with what I’m being told, doesn’t seem to align with my experience.” That’s really where art shines, in my opinion.

For somebody who is a creative who is thinking about a military career, I would encourage them to ask good questions about what they’re expecting to get out of it, or what needs they’re looking to fulfill. Because the military can fulfill a lot of needs for people. It can give them structure. It can give them close community quickly. It can give them a career path. But there is a tradeoff — you are literally trading your body, years of your life, to a militaristic agenda. I would encourage someone to use some of those creative muscles to find ways of filling those needs in ways that they might not have so many regrets about afterwards, when their knees are bad or their back is shot.

Garza: This might not be so satisfying, but I would say you have to feel it out and know what’s right for you. I think it’s totally valid for somebody to have an interest in art and not go into a professional field. I do think it’s a mistake to abandon a creative pursuit. These creative pursuits are snapshots into the human condition and what’s happening in a particular moment. We need artists, people engaged with art at all different experiences, different professions. Making is an act of resistance. There’s a sense that art is frivolous and irrelevant, and it’s not. We live in a visual world, and it’s incredibly important to humanity.

deVera: Being creative is one of those things that works its way in. William Faulkner had an interesting idea which I’ll paraphrase: it wasn’t his choice to be a writer. It was hard for him to write, but something compelled him to do it. No matter what you choose, pay attention to that gravitational pull.

deVera: I don’t know if it’s a direct material exchange for me, or even if there’s something given. It feels more like it’s something that’s always existed. It’s just a way of life.

Garza: It’s actually given me everything. I remember in high school, imagining the future, I wanted to have a life that was surrounded by the arts, and that’s my life now. I get to talk about art almost every day. I have an active studio practice. I support other arts organizations. I work within my community to engage people with and through art, and it’s given me opportunities to travel. The tradeoff is that I’m an artist 24 hours a day. I don’t get to clock out, but I’m okay with that. It can pull me away from my personal life, but I try to manage it as best as possible, because I don’t think I would trade it for anything.

Uptain: I’m at a different career stage, being in grad school. When I’m exhausted or when the artwork is falling apart, there’s a part of me though that’s always like, “I don’t have sand inside my uniform in a foxhole right now. I don’t have people who are either pretending to shoot at me or are actually shooting at me.” At the end of the day, if something goes wrong [with the art], everybody can have a laugh and walk away. But in the military, if a training accident happens, somebody’s probably losing a limb or something like that. So, the stakes are a lot lower, and that helps. It helps to know that I’m doing this intentionally, out of a spirit of hope. There’s a lot of playfulness and community-building involved.

I think that art takes a lot, but it takes exactly as much as you’re willing to give it. That’s where some of these conversations about self-care and taking things at a manageable pace and not trying to have a five-year superstardom art career, but having a 70-year slow burn, developing really high-quality artwork over time in a rich community come into play.

Garza: I am an artist, an educator, and a designer. Materially, I have an interest in post-photographic processes — capturing and creating images with cameras from analog to cyanotypes to digital to smartphones and AI. A lot of my work interrogates the idea of the American Dream, in the hopes that we can make it mean what it’s supposed to mean. I focus on the life of the working class versus the ruling class to show some of those things.

I think one of the things that I really benefit from being an artist and being invested in creative pursuits is that I have a platform to express opinions. Art has allowed me to extend that opportunity to others. And part of being an artist is not having a passive life. It’s about thinking about the human condition from the individual level to family, community, et cetera. There are reasons why there are systems in place to keep us passive, to focus on how much time we’re spending in the office, how we need to have to have certain goods and services. It doesn’t give us time to interrogate whether things are just or equitable. And as an artist, it allows me to imagine individually — but also collectively — something different, something that has been promised to everybody, that most people do not get to enjoy.

Uptain: My artistic project is to destabilize what I call the Cult of American Exceptionalism. Militarism is a big part of that, along with hypermasculinity, capitalism, evangelical Christianity — these things swirl together. I do this by exploring issues of social control and by interrupting the sanitized narrative that supports the American Dream and the America that we’re sold. I do it through installation, performance, and new media. All of those things are skills that I learned in the military as part of propaganda or psychological operations, and I’m figuring out creative ways to redeploy those to move in the opposite direction. What does it look like to ask questions instead of convince people of propaganda? What does it mean to embrace nuanced complexity instead of these oversimplified narratives? What does it look like to inspire people through poetics rather than social control?

I’m trying to get to the reasons for why things are organized and presented a certain way. As an artist, part of what I do is show the things that are not seen. Being in the military trained me in that way because I was embedded in a very strict, regimented culture. And then as an artist, because I went through this culture, I can see the scaffolding or the structures and I can make those visible to others.

deVera: My creative practice revolves a lot on my biography, experiences with being an undocumented immigrant, a veteran of foreign wars, my interest in history and how art affects historiography, how art objects can be seen as multiple things simultaneously, how human narratives will change an object’s meaning while the object retains all its physical properties. The core element in my practice is obsession or compulsion, things that get stuck. I’ll draw and paint whales for no reason, and then find out that it’s parallel to some previous experience I had. In a really informal way, it’s finding things that haunt me in a hopefully productive manner.

I like to synergize and make with a lot of found material because it’s accessible, along with a lot of my old military surplus stuff. I’ll find things that are both military and civilian, merge them, and activate them with my own narrative. Parachutes have been a big thing for me because they’re such an interesting fabric. I like how it forms and sits on top of things, and I really love the way it can suspend or accumulate gravity and how I can play with that illusion in sculpture.

deVera: Not really! I wish I was more organized.

Garza: I still prefer waterproof clothing. I think I was used to being wet for so many years on a ship, that I just really want to avoid it now.

Uptain: I have to field roll my socks! I can’t let my partner do it, they come out all wrong. That, and neat haircuts.