Fallen Norwalk Soldier Portrayed in Washington Exhibit
By Emily Beaver
WASHINGTON, March 21 -With his dark eyes peering out from under his camouflage hat, the portrait of Army Pfc. Wilfredo Perez Jr. now rests in a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery alongside the images of the other military men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perez’s portrait appears in the Faces of the Fallen exhibit, opening Wednesday in the Women In Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. The exhibit consists of more than 1,300 portraits of American military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perez, a 24-year-old soldier from Norwalk, was killed in July 2003 when a grenade was thrown from the window of the Iraqi hospital he was guarding.
Annette Polan, the Washington portrait artist who conceived the project, said the portraits are intended to honor military personnel who died serving their country and to provide comfort to their families.
“I wanted to give the families something more permanently than 20 seconds in your memory,” she said. “That was my hope, that these men and women won’t be forgotten.”
The idea for the exhibit came from pages of thumbnail-sized photos of military personnel killed in Iraq printed in The Washington Post last spring, Polan said. Nearly 200 artists, both professionals and students, created the eight inch by six inch portraits from published photographs.
The photographs used to generate the portraits were mainly from Military City, a military Web site, and the Post Web site. When no photo was available a mounted silhouette was displayed.
The only specifications for the project were the size of the portraits, and requirement that the portraits “honor and respect” the memory of the soldiers, Polan said. The portraits, attached to rows of metal posts, are arranged chronologically by the date of death.
Perez’s portrait, painted by Carole Bosley, shows the soldier in uniform in front of an American flag. Other artists used wood, glass and images of flowers for the portraits.
Those involved with the creation of the exhibit said it was not a political statement about war but a statement about grief and sacrifice. Peter Hapstak, a Washington architect who developed the exhibit’s design, said at a press conference Tuesday that the exhibit was “beyond politics.”
“I wasn’t for the war, but it didn’t matter. We were honoring men who had served us,” he said.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Warner (R-Va.) were chosen as honorary chairs for Faces of the Fallen. Warner also spoke to the family members of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan at a private reception Tuesday.
However, she said, sponsors of the exhibit decided not to extend a general invitaqtion to politicians to the opening of the exhibit, Polan said. “We did what we could do to keep it as apolitical as possible,” she said.
The exhibit will be on display in Arlington until Nov. 11, Veterans Day. The exhibit may go on tour, said Anne Murphy, co-chairwoman of the exhibit. The families of the military personnel depicted in the exhibit will eventually receive the portraits, she said.
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