We must never normalize the presence of troops or federal agents waging war in our cities, or anywhere else.
Author: Aaron Hughes and Arti Walker-Peddakotla
Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, and antiwar veteran whose interdisciplinary collaborative art practice spans drawing, printmaking, and performance. He is involved with a range of art and activist organizations including About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Recent exhibitions include Seeing Through Stone, UC Santa Cruz and San José Museum of Art (2025); Surviving the Long Wars, Chicago (2023); Autonomous Democracy, Arcade, London (2023); Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, & Reparations at DePaul Art Museum, Chicago (2022); and past exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, and Ashkal Alwan Beirut. Recent publications include Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire (Bridge Books, 2024), Invitation to Tea: A Tea Project Archive & Recipe Book (StepSister Press, 2022), and Remaking the Exceptional: Tea Torture and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo (DePaul Art Museum, 2022). Hughes lives and works in Chicago.
Arti Walker-Peddakotla (she/they) is a William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School, movement lawyer and community organizer, U.S. Army veteran, and former Oak Park Village Trustee. Arti’s scholarship and research focus on the intersection of tech and privacy law, state and local government law, and abolition and movement law, and explore the relationship between municipal and state governments and private surveillance companies. Arti currently serves as Board Chair of AboutFace: Veterans Against the War, is an advisory board member of Lucy Parsons Labs, is co-chair of the Public Safety Steering Committee for Local Progress, and is cofounder of the abolitionist community organizing group Freedom to Thrive Oak Park. Arti has a JD, an MS in Microbiology and Immunology, and a BS in Biology. Arti’s writing has been featured in the Law and Political Economy Blog, New York Times, Common Dreams, and Newsweek.