View ‘Premonitions: New Works by Monty Little’ with artist, Monty Little, followed by a discussion with Little and Aaron Hughes.

Through the lens of the Veteran Art Movement*, artists Monty Little and Aaron Hughes will unfold the ways in which Little’s work challenges the dominate histories of the US long wars and prompts everyone to consider their relationship to war and settler colonialism.

Monty Little is Diné, originally from Tuba City, Arizona, located in the Navajo (Diné) reservation. He received a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2015. Little is also an Iraq War veteran who served in the Marine Corps with the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines from 2004 to 2008. Little has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the National Veterans Art Museum, International Print Center New York, Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts, Ralph T. Coe Foundation, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and Rainmaker Gallery. Little is currently an MFA candidate in printmaking at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He and his family reside in Madison. Monty Little is the 2023 Russell and Paula Panczenko prize winner for an Outstanding MFA Student.

Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. He is the co-director of Surviving the Long Wars, the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial and Summit, and a co-founder of the emerging Veteran Art Movement. He co-curated the internationally celebrated 2022 exhibition Remaking the Exceptional at the DePaul Art Museum. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. He develops projects that often utilize popular research strategies, experiments with forms of direct democracy, and operates in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence. Hughes works with a range of art and activist groups, including Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

*The emerging Veteran Art Movement is a decentralized network of veterans and service members committed to making art and using creative practices to transform themselves and a society grappling with endless war, militarism, and dehumanization.