The select works shown and talked about are part of “The Bridges Back Home,” show currently on display in the Pentagon.

Luis Rosa

Artist Bio

Luis Rosa is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is shaped by lived experience, material inquiry, and personal transformation. A U.S. Army veteran, Rosa-Valentin served nine years of active duty, including two deployments to Iraq, and was medically retired in 2010 at the rank of Staff Sergeant following combat injuries. His military service informs, but does not define, an artistic practice grounded in resilience, embodiment, and meaning making.

Rosa-Valentin began his formal art education at the Community College of Baltimore County and later earned his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), graduating with consistent academic honors. Despite significant physical challenges, he distinguished himself as a committed and disciplined artist-scholar.

Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and mixed media, Rosa-Valentin believes that “the subject dictates the material.” His practice resists rigid divisions between mediums, instead treating each work as part of a single, evolving body that adopts the form best suited to communicate its ideas. Materials range from traditional media to found and repurposed objects, including spent rifle casings, allowing content to determine structure and voice.

Rosa-Valentin’s work has been exhibited nationally, including group exhibitions with HMVC Gallery New York—featured on Times Square digital billboards—and at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC). His writing and visual work have been published in Wrath Bearing Tree, Beyond Words, Fine Print, and The Rhino Den. In 2023, he was shortlisted for residencies at MASS MoCA and waitlisted for the Painting MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Through material sensitivity and conceptual clarity, Rosa-Valentin’s work explores how experience—personal and collective—can be translated into form, allowing art to speak in the voice it requires.

Joshua Hubbell

Artist Bio

Josh Hubbell is a photographer and founding member of Single-Handed Arts, LLC, based in Pasadena, Maryland. His practice centers on portrait and long-form photographic studies, using the camera as a way to slow experience and pay close attention to the subtle emotional textures of everyday life.

Influenced by photographic traditions that privilege patience, presence, and careful observation over spectacle, Hubbell creates images that linger in quiet moments. His photographs explore themes of memory, care, and the understated endurance of lived experience.

Hubbell’s work has been exhibited in group exhibitions, including at the Department of Defense, Defense Manpower Data Center, reflecting a commitment to photography as a reflective and empathetic visual practice.