Probing global richness and diversity

by Marianne Arbogast

Traveling in the South in the summer of 1951, Betty LaDuke discovered that she could "pass" for black. Suntanned after working in a cotton field, the 18-year-old daughter of Russian and Polish immigrants to the Bronx had walked into a Memphis café where white people didn't eat, and was taken for a light-complexioned African-American. For the rest of the summer, she maintained that identity, riding in the back of buses and using public facilities designated as "black-only." The experience "opened up a new world" to her, LaDuke says.

It was the first of many worlds that LaDuke was to enter and then open to others through her artwork. LaDuke's vision transcends borders of culture, nationality and religion. But the images, colors and symbols in her artwork are grounded in her experiences of the very particular people and places she has visited in a lifetime of travel. Through her journeys, she has contemplated "an amazing unfolding of our world, how complex and rich and diverse it is," LaDuke says.

"That's why I hate globalization in the sense of trying to make McDonald's everywhere or make us all look alike in jeans."

From her childhood, LaDuke's life has been characterized by diversity. Growing up in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, she spent summers at an inter-racial Workers' Children's Camp. Her first art mentors were Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, African-American art counselors at the camp. They communicated to LaDuke their sense of art as connected to community -- different from the "art for art's sake" perspective she would later encounter in school. Since they had both spent time in Mexico, LaDuke set her sights there as well, winning a scholarship her third year in college to study at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel.

LaDuke stayed in Mexico for three-and-a-half years, moving from formal studies to independent work. She spent one year painting murals on one-room schoolhouses with the Otomi Indian people. In government-sponsored exhibitions, LaDuke was counted among the "new generation of Mexican artists." In Mexico, she also observed the close relationship of people to the earth, which would become a continuing theme in her own work.

When LaDuke returned to New York, she met her first husband, Sun Bear or Vincent LaDuke, a Native American political activist. They moved to Los Angeles, where LaDuke continued her education, gave birth to her daughter, Winona LaDuke, and separated from her husband. After earning her Master's degree, she joined the faculty at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Ore. There she met and married Peter Westigard, an agricultural scientist, and had a second child, Jason Westigard.

With her first sabbatical in 1972, LaDuke traveled to India -- the first of a series of journeys which would deeply impact her work.

"I'm a woman, I'm an artist, I'm a teacher," LaDuke says, "and when I traveled I would try to meet my peer group and see what their lives were like, their social situation, their issues that they dealt with in various art forms in various media. There was a tremendous focus in the 1970s on western women's art -- which was necessary and important, but I realized there was a big gap between western white women's art as opposed to the art of people in third-world cultures."

LaDuke developed two new courses -- Women and Art, and Art in the Third World. She also published six books.

"The writing became an outgrowth of the travel and a way of honoring these women, making them visible to my students and to the larger community," she says.

Her most recent book, Women Against Hunger: A Sketchbook Journey, came into being after Freedom from Hunger -- a nonprofit working with women's credit associations and health education -- sent LaDuke to the regions where they sponsored projects.

"I saw the different ways their programs functioned on four continents, and that was pretty amazing," LaDuke says. "Allowing the women to develop their own projects and pay back the money at very low interest, and also receive health education, was a wonderful way to build community, to strengthen women's position in the villages and to strengthen their economic bases."

LaDuke has seen first-hand the devastating effects of the global food market.

"The thing that's saddest is that, so often, people aren't producing the food that they themselves need for survival," she says. "A lot of the products get exported, and the stuff that does sustain families is done by women on a more difficult basis."

In recent years, LaDuke has traveled extensively in Africa.

"I have a tremendous appreciation for the local cultures and the tremendous diversity," LaDuke says. "Africa is so rich in that sense, and much of the culture is still intact, through language, through village life, through traditions that are centuries-old. I find a great deal of beauty in these day-to-day traditions that people share and I want to catch that, rather than to emphasize the negative that is so much a part of the media.

"The popularization of American culture all over is pretty strong, but there are a lot of choices, too. Folks in Africa love the Jamaican music and Bob Marley and a lot of the political lyrics -- plus, they have their own stars who are really touching upon issues. And some countries have a tremendous amount of pride and limit imports -- of fabric, for example -- to maintain their own identity."

LaDuke has been elated to find that her work has had some tangible effects in the lives of some of the women she has visited. In Mali this past summer, she learned that her book, Africa Through the Eyes of Women Artists, had helped one of the women she wrote about to expand her mud cloth production.

"The book brought people from around the world to her doorstep, visiting and buying her work. It enabled her daughter to stay in high school, rather than be married at a young age, and her sons are working for her, doing the technical aspects of mud cloth painting. Her house now has electricity, and her husband who sells fishing nets now has a little motorbike."'

She is also proud that a women's weaving collective in Zimbabwe is using her artwork as patterns for their weavings. "I had left them notecards, then I sent them some posters, and they felt my work was very African. I felt very honored."

LaDuke's deepest connections have been in Eritrea, where she has spent time yearly since 1994.

"I taught there and I did a workshop there, and I got to know the artists very well," she says.

"Eritrea has been one of the most ambitious countries to make improvements for the people and there is a tremendous sense of self-determination."

Working with the Asmara School of Art, LaDuke produced a video called Eritrean Artists in War and Peace. The royalties -- along with half of her poster royalties -- go to the art school.

"I came at a time of peace, and then war renewed between Eritrea and Ethiopia in 1998. I'd never been to refugee camps before, I'd never been to a war zone, I'd never seen displaced people. But what caught me about these two countries was their Coptic Christian religion. People on both sides of the border have this close link, especially in the war area, and I visited churches on both sides of the border. Here these mothers are sharing the equal misery of families broken up because of the war."

LaDuke's most recent series of paintings, "Eritrea-Ethiopia, Prayers for Peace," reveals the deep impression these mothers made on her.

"Angels were a dominant theme in some of the ancient churches in Ethiopia," she explains. "I loved the angel forms and the fact that they had different personalities. They weren't all serene and politely smiling. Some of them were passive, but some of them seemed to be downcast, angry with people for their follies and almost judgmental. So I did a parody on it. I connected them with people, and mothers, especially, who are making this effort to bring the war to an end and bring their families home again."

LaDuke sees the spiritual themes in her work as "an honoring of many different religions and religious experiences." She describes her own spirituality as "an awareness of a tremendous energy that keeps us all connected and going, a timeless kind of energy, and the importance of just honoring life."

Her own family embodies the diversity that she celebrates.

"My daughter is very much steeped in Native American tradition; my son is married to a woman whose parents were born in Ireland, and their kids are getting baptized in the Catholic tradition; my present husband came from a tradition that was probably Episcopalian. Then my parents are Jewish -- I grew up speaking Yiddish and learning a great deal about Jewish culture, but not with a religious focus. So we've got this great multi-cultural mix, and I feel happy with it and see the common threads that link human beings together." l

Betty LaDuke will be receiving the Vida Scudder Award at The Witness' July 9 reception at the St. Francis Center during the Episcopal Church's General Convention in Denver, Colo. LaDuke's artwork and schedule of exhibitions can be found at <www.bettyladuke.com>. Marianne Arbogast is assistant editor of The Witness, <marianne@thewitness.org>.