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Milwaukee County War Memorial Center, Wisconsin, USA September 2024 – August 2026 The front cover of the final curriculum which has been specifically designed for veterans to teach other veterans. Paul Emmanuel collaborates on 'Talking With Monuments' discussion series. Talking With Monuments: Veteran Dialogues on Remembering is a 5-week public program that engages war memorials as powerful stages to recall and reflect on military service. Often, monuments tell one story, at the cost of omitting others. As a result, the experiences of diverse veterans and their stories become overlooked or forgotten. This ‘erasure’ can intensify veterans’ post-military reintegration challenges. Five veteran leaders will attend advanced training to lead difficult discussions around the topics of status and belonging, heroism, representation, exclusion, remembrance, and impermanence. Moral injury will be thread that weaves these discussions together. We visit 5 memorial sites, with historical mini lectures covering the Civil War, WWI and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pre-colonial Tribal Wars. Participants enact paired poetry and comics at these sites, activating remembrance and expanding cultural narratives around who serves and the stories that are untold. Through these site visits and veteran-led conversations, we cultivate dialogues around military service, public representation, and moral injury. Our aim is to acknowledge the stories that have not been told, or forgotten, and gain a deeper understanding of diverse veterans’ lives and service. 3 cycles of programming for veterans, veterans peer support specialists, and the public, will occur between September 2024 – August 2026. The Team from left to right: Yolanda Medina, Carlos Muñoz, Vera Reddy, Dan Kasza, Katinka Hooyer, Charlie Walton and Paul Emmanuel (front center) Photos documenting the initial lectures and discussions to introduce the curriculum to this group of veterans. This workshop included lectures on emotional intelligence, moral injury and monuments. This workshop was designed to equip this group of veterans to guide other veterans through the discussion series. PROJECT TEAM Katinka Hooyer, PhD, project director, is a cultural anthropologist with 12 years’ experience developing community-engaged programming and research with veterans and moral injury. As project director for two previous NEH Warrior’s Path grants, Hooyer serves as project director, program/evaluation design lead, leader trainer/mentor, and responsible for qualitative evaluation, reporting/dissemination. Leslie Ruffalo, PhD , statistical analyst and evaluator, is associate professor at MCW with experience implementing and evaluating multiple veterans’ outreach projects with VA and in Southeast Wisconsin. Laura Johnson is a community program coordinator at MCW, Department of Family and Community Medicine with expertise in managing multi-partner, educational projects, and financial aspects of grant awards. Johnson is project coordinator. Patricia Clason, MS is a Trauma Informed Instructor at UW-Milwaukee. She will provide advanced training in emotional intelligence and trauma informed facilitation for the Preparatory Training. Paul Emmanuel is a Fulbright Scholar and artist specializing in memorialization. His work explores the way mental and physical landscapes interact in their construction of memories and identity. Emmanuel will provide Preparatory Training on memorials and how they work to construct stories and histories. Sean Clark, MA, Army veteran, is an educator, director of programs at the War Memorial Center. He specializes in curriculum design, public programming of the War Memorial Center. He will provide historical overviews for each memorial site. Bryan Rindfleish, PhD is an assistant professor of history at Marquette University. He is an expert and teacher of indigenous history of urban spaces and will lead the history lecture at the Indigenous Burial Mound in site (300 BC - 400 AD). Otis Winstead is a veteran and President/CEO of Dryhootch Great Lakes, a veteran peer support organization. He initiated the design of the African American Memorial Wall and will provide history lectures for this site. Zeno Franco, PhD is a scholar of heroism and clinical psychologist at Veterans Affairs Franco will provide an overview of heroism as it relates to memorialization and moral injury for our Preparatory Training. Kyle Kummer: Kyle is our graphic designer and has worked with our team for 10 years doing veteran-led design including Warrior’s Path. Kyle will design all flyers, discussion guides and public facing reports. Yolanda Medina : U.S. Marine Corps 1981-1985. Yolanda is the Executive Director of the Military and Family Resource Center at UW-Milwaukee and advises veteran students. She is part of the Female Veteran exhibit, I am not Invisible. Discussion leader. Charlie Walton : U.S Marine Corps, 1968-1972. Charlie Walton is our elder, identifies as a Black Veteran, and is an experienced public speaker. He has 7 years-experience providing pastoral services through the Baptist Church serving the Milwaukee inner city. Discussion leader. Carlos Munoz II : U.S. Army 2002-2019. Carlos is an active member of the Milwaukee Hispanic community, and the Director of Veterans Upward Bound at UW-Milwaukee, supporting veterans in higher education application and attainment. Discussion leader. Daniel Kasza: U.S. Army 2003-2015. Dan is a community engaged researcher, and skilled public speaker, having presented at three national conferences. He is co-author of two peer reviewed articles on veteran engagement in programming and research. Discussion leader. Vera Roddy: U.S. Air Force/Air Force Reserves, 1977-1992. Vera is the founder and leader of the Artful Warrior’s, a grass-roots peer-lead group, for veterans and community partners to connect in creative endeavors. Discussion leader. Talking With Monuments is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Images documenting moments during the veteran-to-veteran moral injury discussions at monuments in Milwaukee during June 2025.

New academic journal article written by Associate Professor Irene Bronner, University of Johannesburg for De Arte, Taylor and Francis. 17 November 2025. Figure 1: Paul Emmanuel. Installation view of The Lost Men France . 1 July 2014 to 1 October 2014, on privately owned land adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Photographed by Colleen Costick, 2014. Courtesy of Paul Emmanuel. Abstract This article examines South African artist Paul Emmanuel’s The Lost Men France (2014), part of his ongoing Lost Men project, as a critical intervention into dominant forms of memorialisation and public art. Installed adjacent to the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Picardy, France, Emmanuel’s ephemeral installation challenges the nationalist ideologies and racialised exclusions of conventional war memorials, such as the erasure of Black South African servicemen from First World War histories. Drawing on Mechtild Widrich’s concept of performative monuments and on James E. Young’s framing of the counter-monument, The Lost Men France is interpreted as a work of art that resists permanence, instead activating memory through vulnerability, absence, and embodied witnessing. This article argues that Emmanuel’s installation establishes a dialogical relationship with the Thiepval Memorial, both supplementing and unsettling its monumental authority. The installation foregrounds haunting and witnessing not as passive acts of remembrance, but as active, critical modes of engagement with the historical violence embedded in memorial forms. In doing so, it offers a reparative aesthetic grounded in fragility and contingency, proposing new forms of commemorative practice beyond the logic of state-sanctioned heroism. While #RhodesMustFall frames recent calls to decolonise public monuments, Emmanuel’s long-standing performative interventions demonstrate a prescient critique, even with their ambivalences, of how patriarchal and racialised structures shape what and who is remembered. Read and download the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00043389.2025.2563405

An online memorial ceremony conducted every September, by living veterans for veterans who have died by suicide. A collaboration with The Warrior’s Path. Video still from The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living . (5 min 26 sec) 2025. Paul Emmanuel’s collaboration on The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living. Suicides are casualties of war. This memorial honors the invisible wounds that led to their deaths. Connect to The Veteran’s Memorial to the Living website

Montserrat College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. May 16, 2025 Paul Emmanuel receives Honorary Doctorate from Montserrat College of Art The framed Honorary Doctorate given at the ceremony A video recording of the commencement speech Paul Emmanuel delivers Keynote Address and receives Honorary Doctorate from Montserrat College of Art. The Zambia-born artist is currently a Fulbright Scholar and preparing for an exhibition of his work at The Smithsonian in Washington, DC. A display of his work was also shown at the college. Read more

Newcomb Art Museum – Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA March 21 – June 20, 2025 Parade of shadows, Paul Emmanuel, 2009. Manière noire stone lithograph, hand printed, hand coloured, signed, numbered and dated by the artist. Black lithographic ink and watercolour pigment on 285 gsm Fabriano Rosaspina Avorio paper, 81 x 158 cm (unframed). Edition 35 If You Look Hard Enough, You Can See Our Future highlights work from the Nando’s collection that was created in South Africa between 1948 and 2020. This exhibition underscores the collection’s extensive holdings in portraiture, cityscapes, landscapes, and abstraction. The artwork on view shapes an understanding of the South African milieu and its transformation over the last seventy years. They also offer insight into multi-generational views on life and placemaking. Paul Emmanuel's lithograph Parade of shadows is included in the exhibition. Read more .

National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA 2026 – TBD Untethered, Paul Emmanuel, 2025, Decommissioned, model T-10, US military personnel parachute with severed suspension lines, detached harness with risers, 550 paracord, High-definition video projection, stereo soundtrack Artists across Africa and the diaspora whose artworks connect to their identities and experiences as LGBTQ+ people are featured as the first continental and diasporic survey of its scale and scope outside of Africa. Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art assembles artists whose work has implicitly or explicitly challenged local and global legacies of homophobia and bigotry, offering imaginings of alternative futures as well as celebrations of intimacy, faith, family and joy. Paul Emmanuel's installation Untethered is featured in this exhibition. Read the original article on washingtonpost.com Connect to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art website