Elmhurst Art Museum is stepping back and letting veterans take the lead. Starting September 12, the museum at 150 S. Cottage Hill Ave. opens A Revolution of Values, a group exhibition featuring artwork by 11 veteran artists that runs through January 3, 2027, with the museum giving full authorship of the show to its veteran curators.
The exhibition is part of the third Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, called Resisting the Long War, according to the Chicago Tribune. Museum executive director and chief curator Allison Peters Quinn called it one of the highlights of the Chicago exhibition season, per the same report. The triennial spans four venues across Chicagoland — the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Walls Turned Sideways, and Elmhurst Art Museum — with more than 60 artists selected across all four locations.
A Curator Who Served in Kuwait and Iraq
Aaron Hughes, who served in the Illinois Army National Guard from 2000 to 2006 and was deployed to Kuwait and Iraq, is co-curator of the triennial alongside artists and community organizers Mohamed Mehdi and Amber Zora, according to Shaw Local. Hughes said the co-curators select the artists, the artwork, territorial themes, and exhibition narratives, and organize the shows themselves, the Tribune reports. Elmhurst Art Museum supported the veteran curators in bringing audiences to them rather than shaping the work itself.
The show's title borrows from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beyond Vietnam speech. Days after King delivered that April 1967 address calling for a “radical revolution of values,” a group of returning service members marched to the United Nations under a banner declaring “Vietnam Veterans Against the War,” marking the birth of the antiwar organization whose archives now sit inside the Elmhurst exhibition alongside materials from Iraq Veterans Against the War, Shaw Local's report notes.
From Deployment Photos to Family Portraits
Among the 11 artists is Eric Perez, a Schiller Park resident and acclaimed photographer who served five years of active duty in the Marine Corps, including two tours to Iraq, and was stationed at Camp Pendleton. Perez contributes work from two series to the group show, the Tribune reports. In one, which he began in 2022, he travels across the country to photograph his former platoon-mates in their homes; he has recordings of meetings with those former platoon-mates, though he has not incorporated those recordings into the artwork itself.
In the second series, Perez works with old digital photographs from his deployment, opening the image code of those files to generate images of what the computer itself reads inside them. Perez was a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Art Fellow, according to the same report. On November 14, 2026, from noon to 1:45 p.m., he will take family portraits for preregistered veterans as part of the programming; a related workshop, Create With Us: Eric Perez, offers participants a chance to make art inspired by his work and runs from noon to 4 p.m. that day, included with museum admission.
A Regional Movement Rooted in Antiwar History
The Veteran Art Triennial and Summit is organized by the Emerging Veteran Art Movement, or eVAM, a Chicago-based collective that previously ran the 2023 Surviving the Long Wars triennial across the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and the Newberry Library. This year's edition received major funding support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the DEMIL Art Fund. The organizers describe contemporary veteran art as work that turns militarism toward antiwar activism and addresses the transition from military service to civilian life or peace activism, placing veteran artists in dialogue with other artists impacted by U.S. wars and militarism.
The four-venue Veteran Art Summit runs November 5 through November 8, leading up to Veterans Day, with free public keynote performances, panel discussions, and poetry readings across all host sites, including a special reception at Elmhurst Art Museum on November 5. Organizers say the third Veteran Art Triennial and Summit gives veterans an opportunity to share feelings about war and military service through their art.
Housed in a Piece of Modernist History
The museum's campus itself carries historical weight: it houses the 1952 McCormick House, one of only three single-family homes in the United States designed by modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, relocated to the museum site in 1994. That architectural backdrop now surrounds an exhibition built by and for veterans in a state that, according to U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs data for fiscal year 2024, is home to an estimated 569,000 to 587,000 military veterans, ranking among the top 10 states nationwide for veteran population.
A Revolution of Values opens to the public September 12 and runs through January 3, 2027. Elmhurst Art Museum will host an official opening reception on Friday, September 18, with early access for museum members at 6 p.m. followed by public ticketed entry from 7 to 9 p.m.
