Our lives are marked by our creative journeys, both inward and outward
This story was originally published by Minnesota Women’s Press.
“Your mother’s art is so direct, so full of hard lessons and stories, and so full of love. That’s what amazes me—your writing is the same.”
This is what Beth Hartpence, a young curator at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, told me as I looked at some of my mother’s etchings from the early 1960s. Today, my mother is 92 years strong and reflects a life lived well, in joy, commitment and beauty.
At 65, I have been thinking about the work of my mother, the artist Betty LaDuke, and how that has influenced my work for almost five decades as a community organizer and writer. Community organizing is not a science; it is an art. There are numbers—percentages, turnout, tipping points, hearings, lawsuits—but there also are magical moments, people, living ecosystems. That is what you learn from an artist: You can repaint, find joy and remember your commitment to life and the people.
My mother comes from tough people. As Jewish emigrants—from what would become Belarus, Poland and the Ukraine—my maternal grandparents came to New York in the 1920s. Their only child, Betty, was born in 1933 in the Bronx, as the daughter of Sam and Helen Bernstein, a painter and a textile worker.
My grandmother was formidable. She was the first Jewish girl to graduate from a Polish school in her region and was committed to studies of history and politics. My great-grandmother would take flour to market by horse and wagon, and then buy a newspaper.
I come from women who sought to learn about the world, pushed against constraints placed upon them and had a deep understanding of poverty, justice, war and joy.
My grandmother, Helen, was about five feet tall and was a member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. She worked in a pocketbook factory. Those textile unions were organized in the decades following the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which burned over 100 women who were locked inside. I was able to attend Harvard in part because of the money put aside by my working-class grandmother.
My grandparents were committed to justice in a time when red-baiting and McCarthyism tried to make people fearful, much like today. They stood their ground.
My mother attended multi-racial summer camps in the 1940s at a time of segregation. Her teachers included legendary Black artists Elizabeth Catlett and Charles White; one day Paul Robeson visited. She lived in a multicultural world and understood the wealth of these relationships.
Her art has been collected by African American colleges, such as Bennett College in Greensboro and Hampton University. Many of her books were published by Africa World Press. Former secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan has written about her.
My mother attended art school at the Cleveland Institute of Art and, at age 20, was given a scholarship to the Instituto Allende in San Miguel Allende. She lived in Mexico for three years. By 1956, at 23, she had five exhibits sponsored by the Mexican government, including her first one-person show in Mexico City, at the governor’s gallery, called New Generations. The exhibit was for young Mexican painters, which she was considered to be at that time. She was painting murals in Otomi communities and met notable artists David Alfaro Sisqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Diego Rivera.
Then she met my father, Vincent LaDuke. My father had left the White Earth reservation and traveled to organize and advocate for Native people. He hitchhiked from the Reno Sparks Indian Community to Washington to talk to politicians about housing and poverty on the reservation.
He met my mother in New York City when she was teaching art at the Grand Street Settlement house. From what I have been told, it was love at first sight. They traveled in a panel truck to Los Angeles. They began a life in East LA, surrounded by farm workers, Indians, social movements and Hollywood; my father was an extra in Western movies. I was born in Los Angeles.
I have lived through the times of COINTELPRO—the Counter Intelligence Program of covert and illegal projects, conducted by the FBI, designed to disrupt U.S. political organizations. I also have experienced the American Indian Movement, my arrest a few years ago with six others for protesting the Line 3 pipeline on the Shell River, and now these times of Trump. My mother’s history tells me we shall overcome.
I understand well what it is to be a woman facing challenges and discrimination. My mother’s commitment to justice inspires me. She was the only woman in the art department for 18 years at Southern Oregon University, where she had a broom closet for an office. Her work documented women artists worldwide, a field of limited interest for years in a male-dominated world. She traveled to Eritrea during its civil war in the 1990s and developed workshops for rural villages. Today, the Eritrean government includes 26 of her paintings in its national collection. She has a great span of artwork about global farmers, for groups like Freedom From Hunger and the Heifer Project; the Heifer office in Georgia is filled with her murals.
For 70 years, she has prolifically created art on themes of catastrophic fires, deadly border crossings, guns and hope. Now she is creating wooden carved panels, shaped and painted in a growing series called Turtle Wisdom.
I was born from a strong line of women and the social justice work that formed them: labor, anti-war, civil rights and the Indian movements. I was taken out of school for anti-war marches. My mother reversed colonial teaching in the 1960s and 1970s by forcing my public school to allow me to sit during the Pledge of Allegiance. Those are the teachings that I know.
Feminist art critic Gloria Orenstein wrote in a preface to my mother’s book:
Artists are visionaries in their own time who can often give us a glimpse of the changes in perception and consciousness that await us via their imagination. Creative journeys, both inward and outward, across space and time.
My mother’s work is symbolic and mythical. So is life, and community organizing.
As I enjoy my mother’s company and art, as an elder myself, I see a reaffirmation of the beauty of life, of humans, and of the potential forever to repaint and create anew.
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