The Art of Human Rights Advocacy
Master of Human Rights alum Moira Villiard (MHR ‘26) has always been an artist. As a child, she imagined pursuing many different careers but always returned to the idea of being a famous painter. To entertain herself, she was always creating things, and her childhood independence meant little judgment as she explored her artistic imagination.
Villiard grew up on the Fond du Lac reservation in Cloquet, Minnesota and attended the University of Wisconsin-Superior for communication arts and global studies. There, she first enrolled in a course on international law, and she became fascinated with domestic and international law frameworks. Now a 2026 Master of Human Rights graduate, she reflects on her career with a profound understanding of her dual role as an artist and human rights advocate.
Exploring Human Rights Through an Artistic Lens
After graduating from UW-Superior, Villiard explored human rights issues as an independent artist based in Duluth. Here she created one of her most celebrated public pieces, the "Chief Buffalo Memorial Community Mural Project," with assistance from over 500 community members and artists. The walls feature both historical and contemporary depictions of Indigenous people, maps of both treaty territories and Chief Buffalo’s famous journey, Ojibwe stories and folklore, and traditional florals.
Villiard also wanted to explore rights neglected in the U.S., eventually choosing to focus on the rights of the child. The U.S. is the only country in the world that has not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. So Villiard created her “Doublethink: Rights of the Child” series to address contradictory beliefs and behaviors towards children’s rights.
In 2024, Villiard received the Bush Fellowship through the Bush Foundation, which supports two years of self-designed leadership development. She decided to utilize this opportunity to pursue a Master of Human Rights degree. The vibrant human rights advocacy community in the Twin Cities drew her to the University of Minnesota, and she also appreciated the MHR program’s interdisciplinary and flexible nature. During her time in the MHR program, she delved into children’s rights, Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and public health, ultimately studying their overlap in her self-designed concentration: Carceral studies.
Through the MHR program, Villiard participated in a yearlong seminar class on parental incarceration and children’s human rights, part of a joint project between HRP and the nonprofit, Children of Incarcerated Caregivers, supported by a residency from the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. Villiard brought her artistic talents to the project, creating a zine, The Hidden Sentence, which explores the impact of parental incarceration on youth and potential policy reform.
Villiard has worked with another artist, Carla Hamilton, on “Waiting For Beds,” a multimedia art project that explores mental health care accessibility and what happens to people in crisis during their “wait” for a bed. It challenges the normalcy of the phrase in social services and healthcare, and the exhibit also features community contributions to uplift the voices of those impacted by the “wait.” Villiard helps her audience to navigate topics such as mental health, addiction, hospitalization, incarceration, homelessness, domestic violence, and other areas of crisis.
Studying human rights has given Villiard a more nuanced understanding of these systemic issues. Before earning her MHR degree, she thought the answer to this issue was simply to “make more beds.” Now Villiard has gained a more critical view of the carceral and healthcare systems, and she hopes to expand future projects beyond awareness and towards solutions grounded in the proactive recognition of human rights.
Advocacy as an Art Form
Villiard has dabbled in many different mediums of art, but mostly focuses on painting, collaborative murals, frame by frame animation, and digital illustration for children’s books. Her art was recently displayed at the Detroit Institute of Art and at the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus. For the St. Paul exhibit, her piece, “The Waters of Tomorrow,” included an environmental justice focus. As Villiard explains, this piece explores an Anishinaabe teaching that “our water today is the same water that our ancestors had, and we wouldn’t have fresh, clean drinking water had there not been lots of people … making sure that was a possibility.”
Villiard has realized that art can be a subversive avenue for advocacy because it is unlimited and unregulated. “If something is going to be … unique or said in a different way, it’s probably going to be artists that say it,” she says. The title of artist qualifies Villiard to enter many spaces with decision-makers, so she holds a unique role in the advancement of human rights. “We expect the unexpected with artists, and people underestimate that,” she shares.
However, Villiard doesn’t necessarily believe in the word “art” because its definition is just a way of doing something, and many languages don’t even use the word “art.” Her goal remains to display complicated topics in an inviting way, encouraging people to form new understandings of human rights issues. “Art is connected to human rights in that it can be more than a tool,” Villiard says. “The way that we are advocates is an art form itself. My way of being an advocate is inherently tied to the mediums that I use. I’m always trying to better my art forms and the stories that I tell.”
