This Veteran Helps Fellow Soldiers Tap into Their Artistic Sides

It’s an understatement to say that Army veteran BR McDonald is multi-talented.
McDonald always dreamed of becoming a musician or an actor, but after the terror attacks on September 11, he decided to enlist in the military.
Growing up, McDonald’s parents were missionaries in Taiwan, so he was fluent in Mandarin Chinese. Perhaps because of this, the Army assigned McDonald (who graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2001 with degrees in vocal performance and religious studies) the task of learning Arabic. Graduating from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., at the top of his class, McDonald served as a linguist with the Joint Special Operations Command.
McDonald tells the Christian Science Monitor, “There are a lot of people in the intelligence community with a creative background. It’s the same side of the brain. Music is just another language. So when I heard something I could repeat it.”
In 2008, he felt a call to reengage with the art world and was determined to bring fellow vets along with him. So the following year, he founded the Veteran Artist Program (VAP). Its goal? To support veterans who wanted to start careers in the arts.
VAP sponsors events such as art shows, theater productions and writing workshops across the country. It also teaches veterans how to make a living as artists by connecting them to mentors, opportunities and grants. For example, in 2011 through Operation: Oliver, volunteers with VAP and other organizations cleared almost 60 tons of garbage from a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore and painted a bright, kid-friendly mural.
“A lot of people only see art as a means of therapy for veterans. That’s not what VAP is about, although we do work with art as healing,” McDonald says. “People have to understand that these are artists who happen to be veterans. The two are not mutually exclusive.”
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Why Does This Housing Complex Have Seniors Reaching for a Paintbrush?

For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
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This Paper Can Heal Veterans

Artists Drew Matott and Drew Cameron started The Combat Paper Project in 2007 as a way to help veterans returning from war process their experiences by turning their old uniforms into meaningful art. Combat Paper volunteers with veterans to show them how to cut up their uniforms, beat them to a pulp, and turn them into beautiful paper which they then cover with stories and images.
The two Drews met in 2004 when Cameron returned from a deployment to Iraq and took one of Matott’s papermaking workshops in Burlington, Vt. Cameron continued his involvement in papermaking, and eventually hit upon the idea of making paper out of his old uniform. The experience was so powerful for him that he decided to offer it to others. Matott and Cameron began traveling the country, offering papermaking workshops for soldiers. Since then, Combat Paper has started paper mills in San Francisco, Nevada, New York and New Jersey.
In November, Combat Paper NJ received a $125,000 grant from the Wounded Warrior Project and a $135,000 grant from Impact 100 Garden State. Combat Paper NJ will use the money to expand its classes and develop mobile paper-making facilities to reach more veterans throughout the state. David Keefe, an Iraq War veteran and the director of Combat Paper NJ told Ralph J. Bellantoni of the Courier News, “We deconstruct, reclaim and communicate. It’s the perfect marriage of concept and medium. It transforms the material, the artist and the viewer.”
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