The Voices of Conscience Exhibit

The Hillcrest Academy art gallery is currently home to Voices of Conscience: Peace Witness in the Great War, through the end of the first semester.

According to the Kauffman Museum’s (Bethel College, KS) website, Voices of Conscience: Peace Witness in the Great War, is a traveling exhibit that remembers the witness of peace-minded people against the First World War 1914-1918. This witness included men and women, religious believers and secular humanitarians, political protesters and sectarian separatists. They resisted U.S. involvement in the war, the enactment of military conscription, the war bond drives, and the denial of freedom of speech under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. For this resistance many suffered community humiliation, federal imprisonment, and mob violence at the hands of a war-crusading American public.

The exhibit is organized in nine themes that encourage exploration and reflection and lifts up the prophetic insights and the personal courage of World War I peace protesters, and suggests parallels to the culture of war and violence in our world today. The theme modules surround a recreation of an Alcatraz Prison cell, the site where Hutterite conscientious objectors were punished for refusing military participation. Text and quotes provide interpretation and raise provocative questions for viewers while large-scale graphics and photomurals immerse visitors in the historical experience of witnessing for peace during “total war.”