This article is a selection from the July/August 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine
UNF honors Veterans Day with flag display, tribute ceremony, art and wellness projects
In honor of Veterans Day, the University of North Florida is hosting a series of free and open-to-the-public projects throughout November to recognize and remember our military heroes.
Veterans Day Flag Display
The annual Veterans Day Flag Display will take place at the UNF Green from Monday, Nov. 6, through Friday, Nov.10. There will be over 1,500 American flags on display to represent the military-connected students on campus.
Veterans Day Tribute Ceremony
To honor and recognize UNF students, staff, faculty, alumni and community members who have served or are still serving in the U.S. Military, the annual tribute ceremony hosted by the UNF Military and Veterans Resource Center (MVRC) will take place at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 7, in Veterans Plaza at the John A. Delaney Student Union. The guest speaker will be Lt. Gen. Richard Tryon, U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.) and senior fellow for international leadership in the UNF Hicks Honors College. Upon graduating from the Naval Academy, Tryon was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1975. He quickly rose through the ranks of responsibility and hierarchy, building a distinguished 44-year-long career that had him appointed Special Operations Command of Europe; Deputy Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Pentagon; Commanding General of the Multinational Force-West in Iraq; and Commander of the Marine Corps Forces Command in the U.S and Europe.
Veterans Themed Market Day
The MVRC will cohost Market Days with the Student Union for UNF students, faculty and staff from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 8, at Osprey Plaza.
Marines Birthday Party
The MVRC will celebrate the U.S. Marine Corps’ birthday with cake for students, faculty and staff at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 9, at the MVRC in Founders Hall.
Combat Paper Art Exhibition
A showcase of artworks produced during a Combat Paper workshop series held over the weekend, led by printmaking professors Sheila Goloborotko and Drew Francis Cameron, will be on display in the Lufrano Intercultural Gallery at the John A. Delaney Student Union from Thursday, Nov. 16, through Friday, Nov. 24. During the workshop series, veterans and family members of those who served honored their military service by transforming old uniforms into art.
“Military in Memoriam” at the UNF Seaside Sculpture Park
The UNF sculpture program installed five new student-created sculptures at UNF’s Seaside Sculpture Park at Jacksonville Beach, including Ethan Harmon’s “Military in Memoriam.” The sculpture was designed to pay homage to the sacrifices those who have served in the U.S. military have made since WWII. Each tag shows the total number of active-duty service members and combat-related deaths in each branch to bring to light the number of people who have given their lives for our country.
Veterans Health and Wellness Monitoring Program
Later this week, UNF MedNexus will launch a pilot program to help veterans in Flagler County track their health and fitness stats. More details will be released soon.
Art Lesson: Veterans Day Tribute
This lesson will visualize a tribute to our veterans through the use of a flag, a saluting soldier image, and a written message of appreciation. Color, line, shape, value, optical illusion, silhouette, and crayon resist will be the terminology taught throughout the development of the project. After reading an article clarifying Veterans Day, a brief written tribute will be incorporated within the artwork to further enhance the visual appreciation to those who have served our country. For ease of instruction, the PDF presentation has been developed to teach the lesson step-by-step. Clear visuals on each slide show the students exactly what to do as they progress through their artwork. A lesson plan has been included which outlines National Core Visual Arts Standards, student objectives, materials needed, vocabulary, and a thorough teaching procedure for each day. Several student handouts have been created and are included to assist in clarity and understanding of the lesson as well as to explain how Veterans Day began. To conclude the project, a student response sheet has been developed with questions/prompts which encourage the students to reflect on their artistic experience with this lesson. Preparing for this lesson is very simple. Print enough copies of the student handouts and organize the art supplies needed for each day. (The material list includes basic art supplies such as art paper, colored pencils, black markers, crayons, paintbrushes, black tempera paint, and black watercolor paint.) Project the PDF slides during class time and guide the students through each step of the lesson. NOTE: This PDF presentation is non-editable
Total Pages
36 pages
Answer Key
Teaching Duration
3 days
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A Veteran’s Artistic Tribute to Naval Might and Sacrifice
The artist’s rendering of the USS Indianapolis. Smith often draws highly detailed features, such as the guns, separately and only later places them onto the larger work.
photo by Fredrik Nilsen; painting by JD Smith
A few minutes past midnight on July 30, 1945, two Japanese torpedoes struck the 10,000-ton USS Indianapolis. In just over ten minutes, it went under. For more than three days, sailors battled shark attacks, dehydration and salt poisoning. Only 316 of 1,196 crewmen survived.
When JD Smith finished his drawing of the Indianapolis, in 2019, he took a drive past a burial ground for veterans in Los Angeles and wept thinking about those who had died on the ship.
“When I feel I’ve captured the ship and its essence … enough for the crew of that ship to say, ‘OK, this representation is our ship,’ that’s when I get the tears,” he says.
Over the past 15 years, Smith has dedicated himself to creating some of the world’s most intricate and evocative renderings of warships that fought in the Pacific theater in World War II. Smith comes from a long line of veterans and served in the Navy himself as a boiler room technician on an amphibious assault ship from 1981 to 1984. He’s a self-taught artist, so skilled a draftsman that he can still replicate the diagram of the engine room of the vessel where he served. A pipe fitter by day and historian by night, he employs pen, pencil and collage. Growing up in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, he spent much of his childhood on the San Pedro and Wilmington docks with his grandfather, who worked as a hydrostatic welder repairing warships during World War II. A cousin of Smith’s stepdad was one of the young sailors who died aboard the USS Astoria at the Battle of Savo Island in 1942. Hearing that story prompted Smith’s obsession with naval tragedies, and every ship he has depicted since has been an act of commemoration.
“These men didn’t have gravestones—they got coordinates,” Smith says. Whether he’s recreating a Japanese or a U.S. ship, Smith’s attention to detail is an homage to the men who walked those decks, ate in those mess halls and slept in those bunks. Smith pores over reference materials—blueprints, photos and first-person accounts—to immerse himself in a ship’s structure and role in the war. He considers every element of the ship’s composition, down to its position in the water on a given day or the angle of a shadow. Among the other vessels he has drawn are the USS North Carolina, the USS Essex, the IJN Musashi, the IJN Nagato and the IJN Kaga.
Though he works largely outside the public eye, his first solo show, “Unforgotten,” is currently on view at the Alfa Romeo Tango gallery at the Battleship USS Iowa Museum in Los Angeles.
For Smith, the Indianapolis is particularly emblematic of the horrors of war: Four days before encountering that Japanese missile, the crew had unknowingly delivered the internal components for the atomic bomb that would destroy Hiroshima and kill between 70,000 and 140,000 civilians.
“I draw the ships without any bias,” Smith says. “Japanese casualties were more numerous, almost every time. Death is pretty final. We’re all the same in that sense.”
