![]() The third room exhibited individual portraits and the mural. The second room featured many bust-length portraits in groups of three, six, or nine, along with letters to the president from some of the portrait subjects. In the center of the room, an open vitrine displayed the president’s own Trek mountain bike and bag of golf clubs, highlighting that he also takes part in the Warrior 100K and Warrior Open and demonstrating the president’s personal interactions with the wounded servicemen. These portraits fully showed the wounded soldiers as amputees with prosthetic limbs. The first room of the exhibition contained a dozen full- or half-length portraits of wounded veterans who have participated in two of Bush’s initiatives for wounded veterans: the Warrior 100K, a mountain bike ride, and the Warrior Open, a competitive golf tournament. This introductory space also exhibits three portraits of Bush by his painting teachers Gail Norfleet, Jim Woodson, and Huckaby. The video has a lively instrumental soundtrack that can be heard throughout the exhibition, though it fights for ear space with the equally soaring music of the digital installation in the center’s atrium. He notes the bravery of facing post-traumatic syndrome (PTS), emphasizing that members of the Armed Forces suffer both visible and invisible wounds. ![]() He refers to the subjects of his video as “warriors” and “volunteers,” recalls his various painting teachers, and highlights the skills one learns in the military. Few novice painters will ever have an exhibition, complete with full-color catalogue, at this scale.Įntering the exhibition, one first encounters a video of Bush speaking about this series. As Bush writes in the catalogue introduction, “I’m not sure how the art … will hold to critical eyes. The rooms also contained central vitrines with objects unrelated to painting, which underscored that this was not an art exhibition, but rather a highly politicized space. This design, augmented with two looping musical soundtracks-one from an introductory video internal to the exhibition and another from a CGI wall and video blaring from the atrium-created a dramatic effect. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, where the walls were all painted olive drab, reminding viewers of the military context of the exhibition overhead track lights spotlit the paintings. The work was presented in the special exhibitions galleries of the George W. Bush painted the entire body of work in under a year. ![]() The exhibition included sixty-six individual portraits, along with a large four-panel mural that depicts bust-length portraits of thirty-five veterans, though some subjects in the mural are repeated from the individual portraits. Bush painted this particular series at the suggestion of his painting mentor Sedrick Huckaby, himself a portraitist, who “was aware of my world leaders series, and he suggested I paint people whom I knew but others didn’t” (14). This last point sticks one learns in the catalogue that Bush met all of his portrait subjects after they sustained their injuries. The exhibition Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors featured painted portraits of ninety-eight men and women in the Armed Forces who sustained injuries in the war in the Middle East. ![]() I figured that if painting had sated Churchill’s appetite for learning, I might benefit from it as well.” Bush primarily paints portraits. In the exhibition’s wall text, Bush states, “I was antsy. Some of my students have seen much worse.īush started painting in 2012 after reading Winston Churchill’s essay “Painting as a Pastime” (20). I think twice when I teach bloody war images by Goya or Gardner or Dix. My partner is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran of the US Marine Corps, and I teach art history at a university where, every semester, around 20 percent of my students are either active military or veterans, most of whom served in Iraq with the US Army. But perhaps unlike other art historians, I have a personal attraction to his images of wounded military veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. I was drawn to the strangeness of his early self-portraits and the awkwardness of his depictions of world leaders. Bush’s retirement pastime of painting with interest. Like many other art historians, I have looked upon President George W. Bush, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors. Bush, Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors, March 2–October 17, 2017, George W.
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