“Do Something Challenging”: Paintbrush Harvest
Kinetic installations, sculpture, painting, photography, children’s art, dinosaur bones—you’ll find them all and more in art exhibits in our nation’s airports. Some of these displays occupy airy atriums or corners of baggage claim; others appear on unused billboards or along moving sidewalks. They share the same hopeful goal: to divert and entertain passengers in an environment best known as an anxiety-inducing no man’s land.
Medford Airport, a 20-minute drive from our house and our gateway to the world of airline hubs, is part of this art-as-diversion movement. When Tony and I arrived last April with our four suitcases and two cats and learned that our rental car wasn’t ready yet, I sighed and glanced around the now empty baggage claim area with its lone carousel. High on the wall behind, a parade of huge, colorful, wooden cutouts of migrant field workers caught my eye—and my breath.
The titles suggested a poem: Pulling Weeds, Green Bean Harvest, Reluctant Spring, Love Lies Bleeding, Hollyhocks . . .. I walked the length of the terminal, swept up in these larger-than-life portraits.
On an accompanying placard, local (and world) artist Betty LaDuke explained:
“My sketchbook visits to our local farms orchards and vineyards began during the 2010 harvest season. I followed men and women up and down along the rows of vegetables, berries and flowers quickly sketching their bending and stretching repetitious motions as they gathered the harvest into boxes and buckets.
“In my Ashland studio, I began my process of outlining select sketches with brush and acrylic paint on 3/4 inch sheets of plywood. This plywood outline was then cut and routed by my assistant Barney Johnson. Finally, many layers of paint selectively mixed with sand were applied to the varied routed surface depths of each 5′ panel.
“With the 2012 permanent installation of 26 panels at the Medford International Airport, I share with an extended community my vision of the dignity, pride and hard work of our local farmers and farm workers.”
In 2016, my friend Kathy had assembled a short documentary of Betty LaDuke’s sketchbook visits to local farms (pulling together footage from two videographers LaDuke had dismissed). She was one of the first people I met here, joining Kathy for lunch at the home she and her late husband built in 1965 in the forests above Ashland.
Wearing jeans, an embroidered Mexican shirt, and with her long brown hair braided down her back, this Bronx native looked 16, not 86. 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 publicizing his cross-country campaign to raise public 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 SOU, Peter Westigard.
LaDuke writes in a memoir, The Artist’s Journey from Oregon to Timbuktu:
“The first decade of our marriage was a challenge! Bagels are tough and chewy, pears are sweet and mellow. Big adjustments! Talking and listening, listening and talking. My Bronx style was emphatic, while Peter’s California voice was a whisper by comparison, but his message was clear and strong. Camping trips, hiking, and exploring mountain lakes and Oregon’s wild ocean beaches offered space for our varied moods as we were nourished by the magnificence of nature.
“Gradually, in my studio a series of large mythical landscape paintings evolved. 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. Sometimes Peter and I embraced within a rock form as in Whale’s Head, or became filled with the energy of flowers, birds, and sunshine, as in Summer Joy.”
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. The results cover every inch of her home. 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 murals such as the 100-foot-high sequence Dreaming Cowsat their headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Early on, LaDuke developed an enduring interest in female artists and their resilience.
“I love women who paint on mud walls of their homes and within their communities. I love women’s ceramics and the stories that their pottery can tell about their lives. I love women working with cloth and patches of cloth to create stories that tell of their oppression,” LaDuke told Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in 2013.
“They’re the newspapers. They’re the ones getting the message out about what’s happening,” she said. “Governments often use the women’s artwork on billboards, posters, school textbooks and educational materials to persuade people to get inoculations, to learn to read or to promote other community programs.”
Some of LaDuke’s most moving artwork is from eight visits to Eritrea, from 1996-2002. There, she met female artists who had fought as soldiers in wars against Ethiopia. She painted their harsh lives in refugee camps, but always accented the women’s strength and resolve. Seeing some of these paintings face-to-face in her home, I pictured my Ethiopian daughter-in-law’s quiet determination as she carried her mother’s dead body from her hospital bed in Addis Ababa to a makeshift hearse. Hospital staff refused to move her mother, insisting her corpse (filled with fluid from congestive heart failure) was too heavy to carry.
LaDuke turned to portraying farm workers in the Rogue Valley, the focus of her exhibit at the Medford Airport, when her husband’s ill health kept her close to home. The theme of sowing, farming, and harvesting food had always compelled her. Now she brought it to her own backyard. In her home studio, she converted her field sketches to acrylic paintings on large cutout panels of plywood. When she finished a panel, LaDuke would load it into her Subaru wagon and return to the fields. “I enjoy bringing the panels back to show the workers how I’ve interpreted them,” she said.
When I left my first lunch with Betty LaDuke, she gave me a copy of her book, Bountiful Harvest: From Land to Table (White Cloud Press, 2016), which traces the creation of her panels of local farm workers. That night, I fell into the chapter, “Do Something Challenging.”
“In 1972, I qualified for my first sabbatical from teaching,” LaDuke writes. “’Do something challenging,’ Peter said, and I did. I went to India alone for one month with pen and sketchbook. Peter also advised, ‘Look at people’s connection to their environment—what they plant, harvest, and eat.’ I did that too, and I have never stopped.”
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