A Portrait of War

To the average person, the statistics of how many people are killed each day in the Iraq war can seem simultaneously overwhelming and superficial: the numbers are huge, but at the same time impossibly distant. How do we deal with understanding these statistics, and how can it impact us once we do? Emily Prince is a San Francisco artist who has taken up the task of drawing individual portraits of every single American solder killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. To date, she has drawn over 4,000 portraits--and is still going. She installs the piece on a 25-foot tall wall, placing each portrait relative to the soldier's hometown to form roughly the shape of the United States. Her work was recently featured at the Venice Biennial: one of the world's most important exhibitions for up-and-coming artists. This piece explores Emily's process in creating, developing, and continuing the project to draw all of the servicemen and women killed overseas. She discusses how the project has impacted her own understanding of the war's statistics, why she has chosen to do it the way she has, and ultimately her role as an artist and as a human being simply trying to relate to the abstraction of war and death.