(birds chirping)
- I enjoy the process of painting because
it is part of me in the sense that it's
both mental and physical.
(saw buzzing)
I like the sense of thinking
about what I'm doing, but also sometimes just reacting
angrily, happily, all kinds of moods, it catches it all.
(bright music)
Paintings evolve, they are like children,
they sort of need to grow up.
And very seldom do you get something that
is mature right away.
It takes the growing and living with it
and thinking about it,
it allows the room to breathe with it and to evolve.
(bright music)
A lot of my professional work has been going to villages
and focusing on women's art around the world.
Or art that tells stories,
that tells you a sense of the land.
Or that is symbolic and connected to birthing, to death.
A lot of my inspiration has come from those travels,
learning and then honoring other woman's art,
that can be symbolic, and it can be personal.
So it breaks every rule ever learned in school.
(bright music)
In 2010, I began a series of paintings,
reflecting the farm workers right here in the Rogue Valley.
And I was always in awe of the harvest season,
just the joy that it brought to me
to see life evolving and growing from the earth.
In creating my work, I don't have a dogma that I follow,
but I follow issues of the here and now.
Because I've traveled so much,
I'm aware of a great deal of suffering
and a great deal of joy.
I tend to care about people who are linked
to communities to land
and want to offer a voice of saying,
I see you and I hear you and I want to present
what I can about what I feel about you.
The paintings gradually began to be parts of
larger exhibits that I had,
including celebrating life at the Schneider Art Museum.
But soon they became part of the
Medford International Airport.
And that made me ever so proud that 26 farm workers
could be on the walls there for thousands of people
to see year after year.
And that's my biggest joy to see the people
that my work represents, getting excited
by seeing themselves represented with dignity.
(suspenseful music)
In April last year,
I traveled to the Arizona-Mexico border.
I met with the Samaritans in Arizona.
And they did things like go to the desert region
on both sides of the border with water
and leaving it in the desert
where they felt were migrant pathways.
I was also aware of the organization called No More Deaths
and how they had documented
up to 7000 migrants that had died,
just trying to cross the desert over a 20 year period.
So in Douglas, Arizona,
remains of a person had been found,
and now they were ready to plant a cross
to honor that person.
And we came there with the cross
to actually do a ceremony.
So this is where I was sketching just trying to catch
just the essence of it.
The faces in the cross are really symbolic.
They're a sense of the many, many people
who have passed away and been found gradually through time.
And then many of them honored and
many of them just lost forever.
My sense birds became almost the arms of the cross,
sort of bearing witness also to the experience
and to the tragedy,
and then they became integrated into
the wholeness of the cross.
(Betty turns pages of photo album)
Oh Jeez.
I grew up with parents that are immigrants,
working class lived in a Bronx Tenement.
The sketchbook became a habit and went with me
everywhere in the city.
Sketching market scenes, sketching street scenes,
sketching people, faces, workers.
I then took that habit around the world.
I got to Mexico on a scholarship when I was 20 years old,
and stayed until I was 23.
I worked ferociously on campus,
and then in the little studio apartment that I had,
and created a whole body of work.
And then Mexico City, there was a gallery called
New Generations, and I had my first exhibit there.
In 1958, two years after I returned from Mexico,
I met Sun Bear, or Vincent Laduke.
And together we moved to Los Angeles and lo and behold,
we had a daughter, Winona, Winona Laduke.
(crowd protesting)
We were dealing with the Vietnam War.
We were dealing with protests here.
We were part of the protest against the war.
So yes, Winona grew up political, she was exposed to a lot.
- [Winona] You don't even know who we are but you're trying
to throw a pipeline across the best
square drive territory in the world.
- [Betty] I'm very proud of my daughter and what she does
is for a bigger sense of family and community,
and the politics follow.
(saw buzzing)
I don't like being confined to rectangles, to squares.
So what I like about the panels is I can recreate the form,
so it holds an energy of the image I want to portray.
It is the image.
And when I go to the lumber yard to buy my wood,
I always buy the least expensive and the guys
kind of look at me, hey, you know,
and I tell them no, no, no, this is what I want.
Basically, I really want the crummy old stuff
that they can't believe I would want but it has character.
I hope people find joy and hope in my work,
but also I hope that they find questions,
questions that need to be resolved that there
are no simple answers for, that makes them think.
- [Betty] This is my daughter Winona, and Don.
- [Woman] Please Welcome Betty LaDuke
(audience clapping)
- [Betty] Hi everyone, I'm really happy to be here.
You know when you're in your in your eighth decade,
one of the great pleasures is,
it's I'm beginning to take the time to look.
And I'm beginning to feel honored
that people are beginning to say, hey,
there is a good legacy here that's with us
and it will be with us.
That makes me feel good.