An artistic vision rooted in social justice
Moira Villard has spent most of her life creating art, much of it with a social justice underpinning. The Master of Human Rights program is helping to expand her views on the issues she cares most about.
Moira (Miri) Villiard grew up on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota and first dabbled in art as a toddler, gleefully painting the walls of her house with the tacit approval of her parents.
Her dabbling turned to dedication, and in the last decade, Villiard has become an established artist. Her work is diverse and impressive, from surrealistic paintings and murals to graphic design and multimedia installations. She’s had over 100 exhibits across Minnesota, Wisconsin, and beyond.
Among her many dozen credits, Villiard led a team of artists in designing and painting the expansive Chief Buffalo Memorial adjacent to the lakewalk in Duluth. The murals focus on the journey of Chief Buffalo and feature historical and contemporary imagery of Native people and their connection to the land.
She also co-organized a multimedia installation titled “Waiting for Beds,” which takes a look at the effects of long wait times for mental health services.
Villiard has been the recipient of a McKnight Foundation and MCAD-Jerome fellowships, and is currently a Bush Foundation fellow. That’s an especially rare trifecta for a young artist.
In the fall she began the Master of Human Rights (MHR) program at the University of Minnesota, a joint offering of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the College of Liberal Arts. The MHR program allows her to further explore issues of social justice while continuing to open wide the lens she uses to explore the subjects for her art.
An opportunity for interdisciplinary education and collaboration
Having lived in northeastern Minnesota her whole life, Villiard was looking for another incubator space in which to live, create, and study. "It felt like it was time for a change of scenery and something I hadn't yet tried before," she says. "School seemed to be a safe bet to broaden my knowledge base and also my understanding of the context that I come from."
She’s happy to be expanding her vision of human rights at the Humphrey School and appreciates the flexibility and interdisciplinary nature of the MHR program. Her Politics of Public Affairs course this spring has her now thinking of minoring in public policy. And she appreciates her Violence Prevention and Public Health course with Joshua Peterson, she says, because it’s an example of the program “bringing people with experience in the ‘outside world’ into the classroom and hearing more in-depth about the work they’re actually doing out there in the community.”
Villiard has been deeply involved with another issue of human rights that is dear to her heart. As part of a two-semester course, she’s been working with a policy team on a project that culminated in mid-April with the Parental Incarceration and Children’s Human Rights Symposium. One of Villiard’s contributions was creating a 30-page illustrated booklet, or zine, for symposium attendees.
She’s fascinated by another issue that’s been emerging for her. “Can we have human rights if we don’t have rights for the environment or rights for the ecosystems that sustain us and keep us alive?” she asks. “That’s been a theme throughout my coursework. I don’t know if it’s necessarily something that I’ll focus on, but it’s something that’s haunting me a little bit.”
In addition to her courses, Villiard loves her “super diverse” MHR cohort. “I would consider everyone experts in whatever they’re hyperfocused on, which is really cool,” she says. “I think networking with them is super valuable.”
Since much of her artwork to date has focused on Indigenous issues, she’s looking forward to exploring even more courses and issues—taking the lessons from each and applying them to her art. Her communications background (a bachelor’s degree in communicating arts from the University of Wisconsin-Superior) “allows me to understand what medium to use,” she says, “and then the human rights piece is … the practical knowledge that I can infuse into the artwork.”
Villiard also plans to revisit a familiar issue—the struggles that some people with grave mental health concerns face. “My goal remains to expand the research that I’ve been doing with Waiting for Beds as an art project,” she says, “and get more inspiration for the social context and underpinnings of the issue of why people have to wait for a bed when they’re in a crisis in America.”
