Service Learning class hosts military cultural preservation experts

Anna Hillary’s “Service Learning: Art, Culture and Community” class at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) hosted two special guests recently: Colonel Andrew Scott DeJesse, Director for the U.S. Army’s Monuments Officer program, and Captain Blake Ruehrwein, Cultural Heritage Preservation Officer for the U.S. Army.

“Throughout the semester, students explore different ways their professional careers in art and design, as well as their creative skills more generally, can potentially serve their communities, cities, and even the greater world we live in,” says Hillary, Ph.D., assistant professor, Writing & Humanities.

Monuments officers are cultural heritage professionals in the U.S. Army who protect and preserve culture and cultural heritage during conflict, according to the Monuments Men and Women Foundation.

“As artists themselves with BFAs (in addition to their advanced graduate degrees in other areas), COL DeJesse and CPT Ruehrwein related well to the students and encouraged them to think deeply about why they create what they create,” Hillary says.

“This visit seemed like an opportunity for students to learn about a way government relates to art, particularly in a productive way,” explains Hillary. “It also seemed to offer a perspective on another form of service that would help us think profoundly about the myriad ways service, community and culture intertwine and matter not just to a neighborhood within a city, but also to the entire country as a whole.”

“They made me think that within the system there’s a spark of hope. I never could have imagined that two military personnel were going to have the same viewpoints as us,” said one student after the visit.

“We were left thinking through ways that culture is used to dehumanize in war, and students made connections to a similar process of dehumanization that happens to marginalized groups within a country. Students also thought through what it meant to try and instigate social change from outside of the system, as we’ve been talking about in class with relation to their service work, versus enacting social change within the system, such as within the U.S. government,” Hillary says.

Learn more about MIAD’s required Service Learning Program, which enacts MIAD’s values of COMMUNITY and KINDNESS – providing students with real-world engagement with our local community and cultivating a culture of social responsibility.