Africa:
Between Myth and Reality

Artist Bio

Betty LaDuke’s parents were immigrants who came to the Bronx from villages in Russia and Poland that looked like a Chagall painting. Her father was a house painter, her mother a seamstress in a pocketbook factory. It is from them that Betty LaDuke inherited a deep respect for people everywhere who work with their hands and actively struggle to protect human rights. Her art makes visible to Westerners what is and has been obvious to other peoples of the Earth from time immemorial – the fact that we are one, in the sense that we flow through each other’s bodies, minds and cultures in a constant dance of life. She both writes and paints the stories of women artists and indigenous peoples in order to awaken us in the West to our own political, spiritual and ecological plight. Betty LaDuke returns to the U.S. from her journeys to tell us about the advantages and values we have lost since we left a life wedded to the land and the spirit world for the so-called “advantages” of the technological monoculture.

Exhibition Statement

After five intense visits I look back and realize that my African travels were also a personal spirit journey. Like a serpent shedding skin, I had cast aside routine responsibilities to experience an extraordinarily different world view. Though it was only a brief period of sharing with people some of the intimacies of their daily lives, customs, and traditions, I was left deeply touched in long-lasting ways. These feelings received visible expression in the paintings and prints later produced in my home studio. I refer to this series of images, created between 1986 and 1992, as Africa Between Myth and Reality. They evolved in response not only to external stimuli but to inner-felt emotions.

At the end of each journey when I returned to my Ashland, Oregon studio, I developed my impressions on large canvases with acrylic paints or metal plates for etchings. The challenge was to convert the essence of my sketched experiences into universal and archetypal images. I wanted these images to reflect local traditions as well as encompass our shared human dreams and aspirations.

African women, between myth and reality, dominated my imagery; as mothers bringing forth, sustaining, and nurturing all life forms; cultural guardians and healers; mythical goddesses; and sexual beings. These themes are exemplified in select etchings and paintings.

They are my praise song to Africa. They are both serious and playful, and confirm the pathway first inspired by my Afro-American art teachers, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett, almost half a century ago.

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