Totem Witnesses and Turtle Wisdom
“Alone in my Oregon studio, the world rushes in and I have a compelling need to give form to the local and global events reshaping our lives,” Ashland artist Betty LaDuke says in the introduction to the catalog of her newest work. Her exhibit, Fires, Fury & Resilience, opens this week at the Grants Pass Museum of Art north of town.
Three years ago I chronicled LaDuke’s extraordinary story in another blog, “Do Something Challenging”: Paintbrush Harvest. She was one of the first people I met when we moved to Ashland, and she has inspired me ever since. LaDuke just turned 89.
As I wrote then, she was born in the Bronx, the child of Russian and Polish immigrants. She met her first husband, Vincent LaDuke (more commonly known as Sun Bear), when he arrived at the Bronx settlement house where she was the art director with a feather headdress and newspaper clippings about his cross-country campaign to raise consciousness about reservation conditions. They married and had a daughter together, Winona, an American environmentalist, economist, and writer who in 1996 and 2000 ran for Vice President as the nominee of the Green Party of the United States, on a ticket headed by Ralph Nader.
When LaDuke’s marriage to Sun Bear ended, she moved with Winona from Los Angeles to Ashland, where she had been offered a faculty position in the art department at Southern Oregon University (SOU). A year later she married an agricultural scientist at Oregon State University, Peter Westigard.
“Gradually, in my studio a series of large mythical landscape paintings evolved,” LaDuke remembers. “I entered into each form, the earth, trees, rocks, water, letting them possess me so that I, too, became the huge wave rising and falling in Ocean Sunrise,or a tree approaching winter in Redwood Silence, or a bird within a mountain in Summer’s End.”
In the 40 years that followed, LaDuke traversed the globe as an artist and activist, bringing her sketchpad to displaced people and forgotten places from Mexico and Guatemala to India and Papua New Guinea. She never tried to market her art, preferring to show it in public places and universities rather than having it end up in private homes. Her work spans decades and continents: in the 1950’s, for example, the Mexican government commissioned LaDuke to paint the outer walls of one-room schools; in 2009, Heifer International commissioned her to create huge murals for their headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas; eight visits to Eritrea, from 1996 to 2002, yielded a rich collection of paintings accenting the strength and resolve of Eritrean women who had fought as soldiers in wars against Ethiopia.
When we met in 2018, LaDuke had turned to portraying local farm workers in the Rogue Valley, converting her field sketches to acrylic paintings on large cutout panels of plywood. Her tribute to migrant workers had caught my eye the first time we landed at the Medford Airport, where they peered down at travelers from the terminal’s walls and Tony and I waited for all of our belongings to arrive.
Our paths did not cross as COVID took hold. It wasn’t until this fall that we renewed our ties. She led me into her studio and said, “What do you think?” My head spun.
At the same time that the pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, the humanitarian crisis on our southern border and, here in Southern Oregon, drought and wildfire were draining our souls, LaDuke had been creating a series of one-of-a-kind, carved and painted wood installations, infused with our collective maelstrom.
How have these events affected us, our families, and her communities, LaDuke wondered. How can we express our pain, resilience, and hope?
Her answers populated her hilltop studio: life-sized creations that were both rattling and breathtaking, whimsical and heartbreaking—what she called “totem witnesses” and “turtle wisdom.”
LaDuke turned to Native American totem poles for inspiration. “They evolved as my witnesses and storytellers…so that we would not forget…and find ways to move forward,” she notes in the catalog for this new exhibit. She explains her process, one she has honed for years.
[The] forms begin with sketchbook drawings. I release emotions as shaped-stories that can be transferred onto plywood surfaces approximately 62 inches tall by 24 inches wide. [With] skill saws and routers, I define forms and give depth before paint is applied to the thirsty wood.”
Here are snapshots from LaDuke’s extaordinary new exhibit. For the full catalog, click here.
Fire, Fury, Resilience
I don’t want your hope… I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is. – Greta Thunberg, 1/24/2019
No one in the Rogue Valley will forget September 8, 2020 when the Alameda Fire roared north from the edge of Ashland through Talent and Phoenix to the edge of Medford. Thousands of homes were destroyed in a matter of hours, and only the courageous efforts of our firefighters stopped the march of the wind-driven flames and prevented catastrophic loss of life.” – Pepper Trail and Nate Trimble, Jefferson Journal, November/December 2021
Seagulls Social Distancing
Border Crossings
Turtle Wisdom: Living in a Way that Would Make Your Ancestors Proud
Power is not brute force and money; power is your spirit. Power is your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth. – Winona LaDuke, internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development, renewable energy and food systems
We are in a pivotal time. The next decade will determine the future of our planet and our global family. If we choose well, we may be able to rebuild before it’s too late. – Vandana Shiva, Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalisation author
For there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it. If only we are brave enough to be it. – Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer
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