As Thomas Crow mentioned in this magazine in 2011, Van Elk studied with Sister Corita Kent, a noted antiwar activist and artist, when he attended Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles from 1961 to 1963. "Camping Art I"—a white tent constructed out of canvas, lace, and gauze, tethered to the gallery’s concrete floor with an elaborate array of guy ropes and tent poles—rises less than three feet high. Any attempt to use the delicate construction for shelter would result in its immediate annihilation. Van Elk’s ineffectual tents prompted the viewer to imagine a foreign landscape while they called into question the utility of the Western tools of war.