Jesse Albrecht
About the Artist
Jesse Albrecht grew up in a small Wisconsin town. At family gatherings he heard bits and pieces about relatives fighting at Tarawa, Pearl Harbor, New Guinea and Vietnam. Joining the National Guard at nineteen–he couldn’t resist any longer the need to understand first-hand what being a soldier was really like. At the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire Albrecht majored in ceramics. In 2000 he moved to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue his MFA in ceramics at the University of Iowa. Transferring National Guard units, Jesse Albrecht was re-classed as a combat medic. He was walking into an advanced life drawing class on September 11th, 2001. Halfway through his MFA Albrecht was deployed to Iraq with A Co 109th Area Support Medical Battalion and attached to the 101st Airborne (AirAssault) Division as an emergency medicine Non Commissioned Officer.
In addition to treating combat and non-combat patients, Albrecht found himself running many convoys around Mosul and Northern Iraq without the ceramic plates for his body armor that would actually stop bullets. Returning home was a surreal experience for Albrecht and the transition was rough at times. Returning to graduate school allowed art to capture the overwhelming cultural, mental, and physical experience of Iraq.
Jesse Albrecht currently lives in Bozeman, Montana. He works in a media inclusive manner . He is in the collaborative art group Paintallica and a hang around of the Combat Paper Project.