Mumford entered Iraq on April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad, and he has periodically returned to the region to document the daily lives of both Iraqi citizens and American soldiers.
Besides war, events he has drawn for Harpers include the BP oil spill, rallies for Donald Trump, POWs at Guantanamo, soldiers recovering at Walter Reed and Brooke Army Medical Center, and most recently, Covid scenes from NYC as well as looting and BLM protests in NYC and Portland, OR.
In April 2007, a major exhibition of his war works was held at the Pritzker Military Library in Chicago.
[7] His work was exhibited “Steve Mumford’s War Journals” at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Tennessee through June 8, 2014.
[6] Mumford's painting "Dying Soldier" was in the exhibition "Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991-2011" through March 1, 2020 at PS 1 in Long Island City, New York.