MIAD professor’s work supports community

A self-described artist, social practitioner and storyteller, MIAD Service Learning and Critical Studies faculty Hj Bullard leads a life of community support, within MIAD and beyond.

“Most of the work I support and share is about becoming better connected, more compassionate, better educated, and understanding that education doesn’t only come from formal training,” Bullard says. “We work with community experts and leaders to lift up voices and needs that are systemically too often overlooked. I know some people might call that activism or advocacy, but for me that’s just what being a part of a community really means.”

Most recently, Hj went to The People’s March on Washington January 19, literally taking the “voices” of MIAD students on their back.

“I sewed two capes made from MIAD voices and artworks, following two ‘I Will wear Your Voice’ workshops with the Textiles Lab, and a friend and I proudly wore them for the march,” Bullard explains.

“At the first workshop, local environmental artist Melanie Ariens also brought her own NOH8 silk screens, and we printed a bunch of brightly colored NOH8 panels in silver in the printing lab. I hand stitched their outlines and they became tiles in the capes. The border of the capes was made from lots of little textile squares cut out by students in the textiles labs the day after the election results … the results were beautiful!”

In teaching their courses, Bullard believes, “Most MIAD students I have worked with don’t realize that they do vitally important community work every day, just by supporting their friends and chosen family, or by caring for the environment. I think realizing that, first, helps a lot. Then we learn about Milwaukee’s neighborhoods and the different challenges they face. We learn about amazing work being done, we meet leaders and community members, and little by little we begin to feel more connected. We form friendships.”

Over the last two years, Bullard has played a lead role in several community initiatives. In 2023, they and students in “Storytelling the Environment” partnered with LGBT milWALKee to provide creative solutions for their new House of History project, an app and website that shares the stories of Black LGBTQ+ Milwaukeeans.

The partnership continued in fall 2024 through the First-Year Experience “Community Partnerships” class. Students met with LGBT+ elders to share intergenerational knowledge about COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS and created a quilt inspired by the event. The intergenerational sharing continued during a panel discussion on elder health care and aging at UW-Milwaukee.

Also in 2024, Bullard co-curated the exhibition “Growing Resistance: Untold Stories of Milwaukee’s Community Guardians,” which was held at MIAD and showcased everyday voices of resistance and resilience around environmental injustice from some of Milwaukee’s most historically underrepresented neighborhoods.

Read more about Hj Bullard and MIAD’s Service Learning program.