When California art professor Chester Arnold opened his New York Times on September 9th, 2004, he was struck by a display of one inch mug shots of the 1,000 soldiers who had been killed in Iraq to that point. He came to his students with an idea: for each student to paint a portrait of one or two of the fallen soldiers as a tribute.
The response he received was overwhelming. Before he knew it, someone was working was on a portrait of every one of the troops who had died. The result is a poignant new exhibit of nearly 1,100 portraits at the College of Marin’s Fine Arts Building titled “To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen.”
In this radio diary, Chester Arnold recalls the day he first brought the idea of creating portraits of lives cut short in Iraq to his class.
Guests:
Chester Arnold, professor of fine arts at the College of Marin, creator of the new exhibit “To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen.”
