ARTS & SKILLS Service was a project that re-staged a World War II-era collaboration between the American Red Cross and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Here in San Francisco over fifteen hundred men a month are being sent out from our three military hospitals with a new weapon in their hands: a skill or craft with which to fight discouragement or boredom..." Sophie Morris Kent on Arts & Skills, 1944 On the occasion of SFMOMA's anniversary exhibition "75 Years of Looking Forward," I was commissioned to research and reenact self-selected episodes in the history of the Museum's public programs. What began as an artist residency evolved into a series of interactive installations, public conversations, hands-on workshops and other exchanges in which I brought Bay Area makers, veterans, art students, and art therapists together in dialogue through forms of making and doing. In ARTS & SKILLS Service, I enlisted a volunteer corps of artists and craftspeople to teach hands-on workshops to military veterans, in order to engage in dialogue through creative skill-shares. At gatherings at SMITHS, SFMOMA's original location at the War Memorial Veterans Building at San Francisco City Hall, and the FOR-SITE Foundation Exhibition Pavilion in the Presidio, we shared the research, resources, ideas and questions occasioned by the project. In 2011, I began partnering with Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco-based non-partisan veteran service organization whose program SHOUT! for Women Veterans was inspired by the notion that the arts encourage expression and healing. In 2012, I led a series of workshops on the theme of trench art: objects made by soldiers, prisoners of war, or civilians, where the object’s making and materiality are directly linked to armed conflict or its consequences. Along with collaborators Amber Cady and Helena Keeffe, I presented historical trench art objects as “conversation pieces,” then demonstrated many of the skills needed for making the objects.