“The Tenacity of Hope”- Veterans for Peace Exhibit features Dan Shea

I’m lucky because I can namedrop Dan Shea and be confident that not only do I know his work, but I can count him as a friend. I met Dan Shea back in the early 90s when I was a returning student at PSU after dropping out of a school in Florida and Dan was a new student after engaging in class war for decades and finally finding himself out of luck and needing to start over. Our experience of school, our approach toward education, art, life, were very different then. While I saw the University as a holding pen or a limbo between childhood and something unimaginable, Dan looked at the University as a space to be both contested and embraced. He pursued a Master’s degree in art, founded the radical student group Student’s for Unity, turned in photographs to the official student paper called the Vanguard while helping to start the alternative leftist paper the Rearguard, taught classes, led fights, and generally altered the institution he was in, if only for a moment.

On August 4th Veterans for Peace will bring “The Tenacity of Hope” exhibit to PSU’s Smith Memorial Student Union, and my friend Dan Shea’s work will be displayed as a part of the Veterans Group Exhibit in the Littman Gallery. Dan wrote the Exhibit statement, which I will not quote at length here, but which describes how what Veteran for Peace aims to bring what he and others saw during their time at war as well as what they dreamed and continue to dream. In his typical fashion Dan has turned this exhibit into a call for a kind of revolution, and I urge all of my reader in Portland to attend and see Dan’s memories and dreams for themselves. He has a way of clarifying with the lines he draws, a tendency that he brings to both his canvasses and to his life.