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Bullets and Bandaids Gaining Momentum in 2025

2024 was a monumental year for Bullets and Bandaids that saw our mission expand and our audiences grow. Through our exhibitions at the Ringling College of Art and Design, as well as our recent exhibition at the Richland County Library (Columbia, SC), we have grown the number of our attendees to roughly 60,000 people, providing a platform for healing dialogue between veterans and civilians that is both groundbreaking and truly immeasurable. We will continue touring with our present collection and will let everyone know when and where we will be as we move forward.

With a grant from the SC Humanities, we also started our discussion panel series, “Bullet Points,” where we interview past participants about not just the impact of their collaborative efforts, but what inspired them, as well as where they plan to be in the future. This series will continue throughout 2025, allowing us to showcase our past participants and give acknowledgements to those working on our current program.

Having finished almost 60 interviews for our upcoming volumes, some of our subjects include:

  • 5 Native American tribes, including an interview with The Chief of the Waccamaw
  • Modern POWs
  • Tuskegee Airmen
  • Delta Force
  • The Deputy Chief of the General Staff of Ukraine
  • Drones
  • Nuclear bomb testing (including one that was only recent declassified)
  • The relationship between military brats and their parents
  • A direct descendant of samurai
  • Service dogs
  • Private security organizations
  • and the list goes on.

The literary and artistic aspects of our current program also include:

  • Two poet laureates
  • Music, including jazz, blues, and rock and roll
  • Slam poetry
  • Jewelry
  • Art Fields winners
  • A trauma-savant
  • Several forms of sculpture
  • Roughly 20 countries represented (out of the roughly 180 participants)
  • with more to come.

In the coming year, we plan to produce more art, more stories, and more opportunities for engagement between veterans and civilians. One goal is to add a layer of interactivity to our exhibitions, allowing visitors to directly message our veterans, artists, and writers. We will be creating more volunteer opportunities, more opportunities for patronage, memberships that give you direct access to our collection, and sponsorships that not only pay the artists, but allow us to continue touring with the original work.

Through these efforts, and with your help, we will continue to give veterans a platform to speak their truth and guarantee that truth is heard. Through this, we have people from across generations, demographics, and geography eagerly investing in one another, and by doing so, we create the sort of healing dialogue that is both wildly effective and desperately needed.

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