 I came here with the name Betty LaDuke. I ended up with the name Betty LaDuke Westergaard. I came in 1964 because I had a job, my first college teaching job in the art department of Southern Oregon College. The campus was very small and I had an office that had been an enlarged, that was an old broom closet in the basement of, I think it was a Brit at that point. It was pretty dim, pretty dull, and so it was not that building, it was another one. And I had five classes to teach, not much different from the junior high where I was teaching in East Los Angeles after I got my degree at Los Angeles State College, which is now a university. So it wasn't a pay change and it wasn't much in terms of the work, the hours of work, but it was just a challenge and I wanted it and I wanted college teaching. So I came eagerly and lasted 32 years. Who was in your department at the time? Well, I think it was Jim Durdier that was the head of the department and there were about five people, Bob Austin. I'm forgetting some of the Badonia, Frank Badonia, and there were about two other people, so they were all men. And I came to take Marion 80's place and she was the woman who had been here many, many decades before myself and I actually got to meet her. She was still around, retired at last, but it was sad to see a woman that had dreams of being creative, so used by the system, so exploited by the system that there was no time for her to paint. She passed away soon after, but she had a wonderful giving attitude and students and everyone loved her. She was a great person, but it made me say to myself, this is not gonna happen to me. So what did you do so it didn't happen to you? I kept working, I kept working and also things got better. So from five classes, it was four classes, then finally three, but also I had a wonderful marriage a year later and a very supportive husband and I had a studio. So I have a small kitchen and a studio on the other side of the kitchen that's very big and that was a bargain in our marriage. We were both professional people and this is what I needed and that was our agreement when we built this house with very, very little money. The house has since grown through five decades, but with that arrangement and support, so I feel very, very lucky in that sense. Also, when you live in a big area like Los Angeles, it takes a lot of time to travel to and fro. I could walk to the college and walk back and I could paint between classes, even lunchtime. So I never waited for a long whole day to paint. Every day something had to happen and it could be squeezing in the hours you're there, early in the morning, late afternoon, whatever, whatever, because also there was a child and then a second child. So that was part of who I am. What was the campus like at that time? You talked yesterday about women. What I liked about the campus is it was small and it was one coffee pot and you met people in that room, I think it was in Brit where the coffee pot was. You met people from other departments and you learned to chat and learned to say your name and to catch on so who's in science, who's in biology, who's here, who's there. So you make some friends that way, which was good. And in those days, nobody had a lot of money. Early friends were like the Rybergs, for example. Chaila, Chaila Tapp, other folks and whose names are not right on top right now, but it didn't take much. Like our couch was like cement blocks and a plywood board and a foam cushion and what you did was you had a big jug of wine, you made a cake and you said, hey, let's get together on Sunday afternoons and you just weren't shy. But so I came up alone with Winona, but even then on Morton Street, the houses still there were tiny duplex. I had an etching press. So the etching press and the couch competed for room, but it didn't matter. People enjoyed each other because everyone was young, everyone was economically not well settled yet. And that's how you made friends. You just sort of did it and in turn you got invited back. So there was a certain camaraderie that was built up. The Reynolds were another couple and I'm forgetting names a little bit now, but there was a camaraderie because it wasn't such a big campus where you encountered people in other departments and so on. Were you funded? Did you have, what was your studio like there? Were you, do you feel like you were able to express yourself there? What were the students like? I understand this is your heart here. Right, no, what happened with my teaching is I like to work with people and I love the challenge of taking students, especially those whether or not an art major or those who are preparing to teach others or those who are art majors. And I have a way of working where the work becomes personal. It isn't a technical thing. It isn't all about perspective, but it's also about the passion of learning your tools, but quickly, quickly using it as a vehicle to find your own depth as an individual and your relationship with a larger context, community and society. So I had projects even in the drawing class like my husband would provide me with pairs because he was an agricultural scientist and pairs were his specialty, but the pairs became personalized humans so that students would touch the pairs and then we would have assignments like, do pair prison? What is it like if that pair becomes a prison to you? What is it like if it becomes pair jazz? What is it like if it becomes someone that's running or someone that's very frightened? So things took on personalities and that's how the work became very alive. And I still have bits and pieces of student work in photograph form that I really, really loved and loved to see them being surprised by what they could do. So teaching has been a natural for me. I don't know how to say it other than when left alone, I feel like I could dig into the media, I could dig into the basics so that students could learn very quickly, not to be afraid because I encouraged messes. I liked working so that nothing mattered other than the experience of doing it and then to find your own strength. But things begin with the mess. I say, that's how babies are born, so don't be afraid. So it's kind of, you know, so they had to get used to me and I've always, you know, so that's been it. And then later on I had academic challenges when I taught the woman in art and in art in the third world so those were more a different kind of challenge and those days nobody wanted you to teach like anybody else. You could have the freedom to set up the projects and to cover the media that was asked of you and to cover some of the basic ideas. But it wasn't like one book, one curriculum is like a plan for all of us to teach exactly alike. We had room to be who we were as teachers and that was a blessing. Did you have any difficulty getting those courses through? I didn't, which was great. That happened later on. And all by chance as I began to the travels and began to realize the travels which became annual summer travels of anywhere from three weeks to six weeks but mostly like three to four weeks. I began to be interested not only in the culture I was experiencing but also in women. What are these women creating and what's their life like compared to me? Compared to myself, what are their opportunities? So I began to turn things around but the first place I really began to do it was in Latin America where I could speak Spanish not perfectly but no one cared about that. But also I would take things about my own artwork. I always had something, something to show and being a teacher was respectful. And also as I began to write about folks, the woman and their stories sometimes they were published and I would just let them know that why I was doing it and to share with my college students. And also in between that I was bringing my sketchbook and I was able to sketch their environment, their lives, their culture and that became the subject for my paintings and then for my teaching. So it was like a beautiful, beautiful kind of round robin. I was very lucky. Yeah, a relation. And continuity and integrity of a body of work. Right, and that connect with other women around the world to see their, what their stories were. So my very first book was a Compañeras, Woman Art and Social Change in Latin America and my good friend Shayla Tapp helped me write in the sense like, oh, it's not natural for me. I, you know, it was an art major and I did my thesis but you know, basically I was an artist. And so, but the stories were little chapters about the different experience in a certain country and it was the politics of the art that the women were doing, the circumstances that drove them to do embroideries of life and death and chilling, for example, or the birthing dolls in Peru or the experiences I had in Cuba and what the woman artist was sharing there. So it became something that was an overflowing and eventually it got so that I could, you know, deal, you know, have more confidence in the writing. And City Lights was doing books about the poetry of Latin America. So this was something they jumped on and I had a lot of help from that editor and so on. But... You've got books here, do you want to talk about what? Yeah, these books are not the ones I've written but I've been so happy, like for example, I love the title of this and I love this particular painting, This River of Courage. And this is a painting that was inspired by my trip to Jamaica and it's a woman but the woman is much grander in spirit. She could be woman anywhere in the world and what it was was going to Jamaica and because I read in a magazine a short article about a woman called Edna Manley. Now she happened to be the wife of the premier, the first Jamaican premier and she was of the English heritage but she was an artist and the little story that I read in a dentist's magazine got me to understand she was doing some dynamic sculptures. So I, you know, how do I get to meet this woman? So I took first of all a little portfolio of my etching so she could see my own work and let her know, but somehow it took a week to get an appointment to see her but I had to go through other people and people let me to other people but meanwhile I was seeing her work in the museum there and when I met her I was just blown away by this gracious older person who is I think younger than I am now but I think one of her sculptures in the museum was about the grandmother, the grandmother who embraces all the children because the mother has to work and the father is working elsewhere and the grandmother is the one that's holding it together. So somehow it's that sense of woman, of woman supporting and caring and struggling. So this is a painting that has been used a number of times in a number of different ways but now I gave it to La Clinica right here in the Valley and just am delighted that it has a home and a public space that's appropriate for it. Let's see, oh here is a woman in the time of AIDS it's the same cover again, the same image she gets used again and again. Mostly I'm so excited that my work just connected with a lot of people of a lot of different cultures from poetry to life stories of Asian pioneers in women's studies. So this was a time when women's studies was just growing and women in art was just growing and this is one by an African American woman author, J. California Cooper, The Matter is Life and just so pleased that she chose my artwork for the cover of her book and then this is a painting that I donated to the Ashland Public Library. So there are these wonderful connects and this is a church that I knew nothing about but it's been involved with African American history and culture and once again it was the artwork that spoke to people, not who I am, but the artwork and that's what matters to me that the work connects with people all over and I'm very proud of that and embracing the spirit women's perspectives on hope, salvation and transformation. So I think this has been a joy. Other artists look for or receive joy in different ways, the big gallery, the big museum where it sells and all of that and I've had diverse joys from my artwork being public in many ways and connecting with people and that's been the main thing for me. So do you wanna give a little context to what happened downstairs? Oh, Judy Howard has had the Hanson Howard Gallery for maybe five decades and she would be the first one to show my work from China. When I had gone to China in 1976 and then developed a body of paintings like it was where I had my first exhibit, not at the college but often Judy. Judy was there for me. At the college it was tougher so that show is called China and Outside is Inside View and it traveled across the country to about 14 different colleges, university, art galleries and so on and then finally I donated the work to the Cousart Museum because I had a good storage facility and then more recently it comes to life again and the show that I had there which is my retrospective, how many decades later? So it's just wonderful that the work has homes, lives on and so the work from China is once again, it's in here represented and it has a life that continues so you just have to be trusting and hope that you trust the right people and that they care and then will make your work visible through time as appropriate for them too and their communities so there's no set time. Yeah, let's see if there's a whole photograph of this. Oh wait, I was gonna show you this because I talked about the love totems so here are the totems that you saw in the Schneider Art Museum so those pieces downstairs were part of it so this was recently at the Brower Art Museum where they have 20 of my paintings and the person who made that connect for me was Latha Nenata some time ago and so on so he's been a great friend through decades and so on but it's the border crossings that have caught people and it's also the fact that my folks crossed borders they came from another continent here I grew up with that heritage and that background and just totally aware of the many holocausts that the world has experienced, the injustices and so on and right now it also connects very much with the migrants and the border crossings that they're experiencing from Latin America to the US, from Syria, crossing the Mediterranean and the horrors of what people, the shifts for many reasons, political climate change, personal that people have forced around the world to experience and connecting with that, connecting with that and social justice so it's been a continuity, a long-time continuity but thank goodness they've been also experiences of peace and joy that have been able to capture and I'm very grateful that I've had this great family and a sense of community and that's been beautiful. What will you do with your work? How do you, you've got, you know, we look below at storage racks and racks you've got. No, it doesn't, you know, because work is out. What I've done is set up in my, what do you call it, the trust so that I have a deep connection, long-term connection with Willamette University and their Haley Ford Art Museum, it's a long story so that what isn't already in public collections should be divided between them and this university and the money from any sales should go for an endowed art scholarships so that's what I want. Yeah, but also here and there it's nice to sell which doesn't happen that often and like for example, the Brower Art Museum gave me three shows but it's part of a university and when it's with their new buildings with zero artwork in it I donated 20 paintings and it was such a joy to go back for my current exhibit there, this catalog and to have faculty and students want to meet me because they come out of their classroom, they see these big paintings in their hallways and they're just thrilled. So that's the kind of what I like more than the personal home and also the paintings are too big for 99% of personal homes. So yeah, so I have work in a lot of public collections across the country and that's a certain gratification because you can't hold on to anything. It's all, you know, we're all moving. There's a lot of collateral material that goes along with your work though. There are photographs and journals, your diaries. The people who have my stuff is the archival collection is Willamette University, their library. So they have a ton of stuff and so on. So I have more to keep giving them. Yeah, so it'll be there. And so that's arranged. And here the facility isn't so great for that. The, I mean, the Hannon Library. I mean, they already have permanent work in their permanent collection or the Schneider is really not that set up to collect more, but they will be receiving more and then for them to decide what they want. But as much as possible, I'm like I just donated pieces to be up at Oregon State University. I have a good connection with them because that's where the husband worked or had that connect. He worked in the Valley here, but he was paid by them. So there aren't about agriculture. So I have donated a lot. I'm gonna have a show opening up in February at the governor's office in Salem of my bountiful harvest and they were all excited about that. But so I'll be working on designating maybe more like certain more works should go to art about agriculture, but actually donated two of those pieces to the biology department to honor Frank Lange. So things, you know, so it's, I like doing that. It's fine, you know, because the work has to live on is the feeling that I want. And so on. So I'm just gonna get over this thing here so I can keep on doing that. Yeah. So you've not had any problems with your hands? Yes, because in 1996, I had an etching press in the studio and I was using the rollers to roll colors on like that big plate there. And I found it tough at the printing and the wiping and so on. And it was also painting. And painting is my first love. So I, yeah. So I decided to give up my etching press and to, it's like after I started maybe in 1960s, 1960-ish, I started at the, you know, college. And then so it's been a good run of 36 years. So it's like, okay. And now it translates into those wood panels because the technique for cutting and shaping etching plates is what I'm doing with wood. And then the engraving, which is, I have tools that are, you know, with a little electric motors. So it makes that gouging a lot easier. So somehow it seems satisfying right now to do these totem pieces that are not as easy as the agricultural pieces, which you catch like that, but these are more symbolic and so on. So right now it feels like that's, you know, what I want to keep doing for a while. I think it began with my sketchbook in the Bronx and in Harlem because I went to the High School of Music in Orit, which was in Harlem. And teachers, and then my connection with Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett. So the sketchbook became a catalyst for catching immediate impressions that then could be used as information to develop paintings. And then the paintings began to happen slowly when I went to college in Cleveland and then Denver and Cleveland, but really began to grow and happen in a big way when I had my scholarship to the Institute of Allende in San Miguel and then Met Diego Rivera, Met Zekeros, Met Tamayo. And so the grandness of their work and the connection with community and history and then began to paint at the Instituto and have exhibits. So those were my first amazing exhibits as a very young person, very serious about doing the work and respected by that country. Here I am, a young American and given all, you know, lots of opportunities to exhibit and so on. And then living with the indigenous people there. So coming back to New York afterwards was a period of great turmoil for me, great turmoil and transition until I connected with Sunbear, my Native American husband and we moved to LA and then I found the passion of etchings and etchings could do my stories. It was a different form of storytelling, but also wonderful teachers at the university in literature that spurred my imagination that I loved literature in North BC, AD and just wonderful teachers. So literature became a, but also earlier in my own life like it was Howard Fast and his book about the South. I'm forgetting the name and Mark Twain Life on the Mississippi of Maxine Gorky in terms of the mother, Mother Courage. So lots of books and poetry and then also African Americans and Langston Hughes for example was one of the first authors I connected with and then from Latin America was Pablo Neruda and others my ability to recall quickly now is like there. So literature has always been a deep connect in terms of image making, but also growing up with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and growing up with the modern to where we knew Picasso's Guarnica. So the richness of living in the city, having wonderful contacts as a young person and then just building. So my first real body of work in terms of painting came with Peter and marriage here and the settling into a having a studio for the first time, a studio, a really generous place to develop. So there's a lot of family paintings, a lot of Oregon joy and paintings about my children. And then the sabbatical that got me to India and the husband that encouraged, so I can't say enough about how lucky that can be because it isn't so for many women. And so there was a body of work about India, that trip. So every time I had a cultural experience it began to be the focus point for a body of work growing out of it. And then connecting with exhibit touring services, which was out of Eugene at the Museum of Art there, where they took my work and began to make shows for me that they toured and so that it began to see and catch on to the process. So when they folded, I began to do it myself, a grant to go to China, like the first person in the Valley here. So I had depended a lot on grants, 1976 when the doors just barely opened and you had to have special permission. So I pushed, but every time I pushed, I was obliged to make the work count for other people. It wasn't just me having fun in the studio, it was just also how does that work? How do I as an individual reach out? So I had to learn to do slide talks and talk to any group that would hear me and be very open. So I got used to that and didn't mind because the talking and the questions that came reinforced ideas and concerns and helped me. So everything I did sort of, I felt very lucky was like a full circle and it just kept spiraling. But the real big breakthrough in terms of writing was the commitment to go to Latin America. I forgot how many years I went to about 11 countries only, but that was the stories of these women in my first book that I wrote about other women artists and the consciousness of the women's movement was to me very limited here because Judy Chicago, and I also brought women onto the campus. I brought Judy Chicago here. I brought Faith Ringgold here and several of the authors of major books. So those days there were enough funds and so on. But also the work of the feminist movement to a large extent was body centered and a lot of it was sexual and for me it meant much more, much, much more as I traveled and saw women struggle in the stories they had to tell through their artwork. So I just was part of it and ignored it and grew in my own way and contributed through women of color, which they weren't touching, but women of color around the world. And then in this country, when I did women artists' multicultural visions, it was African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic, and I went to their homes, their studios and documented and so on. So all that was like just exciting and everything gave me back. So everything was reciprocal. If I gave to somebody, I got it back and it inspired my own work. So that was also, you just don't take, but you get and you give. But it gave them visibility so that when I taught my classes, I had the books, I had the material and I could share and make it alive and interesting for them. Any idea how many discreet pieces of art you've created? All through etchings and several hundred paintings. And oh yeah, I worked with Heifer International. I didn't even talk about that. And they paid for almost all my travel and it's all donated to them in public spaces. They have an education building with 26 wood panels up there and then in their major building they have about 30 paintings. Yeah, it feels so good. I mean, that kind of thing. And there wasn't a money exchange. It was, I mean, it was in the sense of the travel. What an education, you know? So, oh, I don't know. Oh, it's for Heifer, over 60, several hundred. Oh, and etchings, maybe 200 etchings. Yeah, paintings and then wood panels. And I got into wood panels a lot, yeah. Do you have a checklist of your work? Have you photographed every piece of your work? Sort of sporadically and then it's given away or it goes away. And I do have a sort of inventory as to what's left sort of because more recently I gave away more paintings, more wood panels. And because they will eventually be divided between Willamette and SOU and Endowed Orts scholarships is the goal. So that's kind of the, you know, what it's about. I don't exactly have a tight inventory. I keep, it's hard for me to keep up with me because I don't have computer skills or secretarial skills. You know, sorry about the cane, but you're catching up with me a little bit, yeah. Tell me about them. And these are my social justice panels. And they go from the DACA Dreamers to Still We Rise to Climate. This is Climate. These are the tornadoes, the cyclones from Alabama to Mozambique. And this is close by, this is Paradise Lost, the town of Paradise and the fires that we've just had, the devastating fires that were seen once again in Australia and other places. So dealing with the issues of here and now. And this is one about Bill Bridges' nut walls. Yeah, so anyway, this is my anger at Melania Trump when she went to the border to see the children about a year ago. And she wore the jacket that said, I really don't care, do you? So this is my piece called The Children. I really care, do you? And this is a piece about the shootings, the school shootings, and the children who were walking with signs saying, am I next? And that was even here in Medford, Oregon. So I've been concerned with all these issues of here and now, and these are some of the samples. To Arizona, I was invited by Peg Bodin, who lived in the valley for like 30 years and she's a retired nurse. And Arizona was her homeland, but she wrote a book called A Land of Hearted Edges that dealt with the migrants who were trying to come from Mexico into the U.S. and dying in the desert in Arizona and so on. And how she connected with Samaritans, mostly older retired people who said, no, this is wrong. And they would do things like leave water bottles out in desert areas where migrants were known to pass and so on. But it's a long story and what happens to is there are many supportive groups and it was an amazing experience to learn that these are good, mostly white, comfortable Americans who cared about what was happening. And also they would go on desert searches for migrants, but when they found areas where they had died, it's nothing but bones left, they would mark that area, make a note of it, and then go back and actually put across, plant across, so this is the planting of crosses. It's a desert cross to honor that person or the DNA to honor the life and have a ceremony hoping that the spirit of that person would reach the family and know that they were being honored in some way, even though their journey, their hopes and dreams had not reached fulfillment. So it's actually, so this is the last piece I just recently finished prior to having to deal with my own leg issue. And it's Enrique's journey, the book by Sonia Nazario that inspired this piece. And it's about a child, a child, Enrique, who tried to reach his mother of the United States. So from Honduras, he tried several times and finally made it, but he had to take La Bestia, the trains and the horror of that and so on. And Sonia as a reporter and as a writer, she also experienced that, she made it part of her learning and writing experience. So in reading this book, there was also a chapter called Hungry for Hope. And that's the, that feeling those words inspired this particular piece. Okay, one break, that's part of the collection at Lammett University. One, a great parvist and Oscar works with the Michael Moore but this is his daughter and so on. So these are two of the panels that have traveled around the country fair amount with my celebrating life exhibit. This goes back to the water protectors and what was happening with pipelines and water, love water and that oil and water is life and also the horror of what was happening and the people protesting, not wanting the pipelines to come through. These are symbolic, but also inspired by what's here now in the valley. For example, I chose a totem form. I did not go to Standing Rock, but I chose this totem form as a way of connecting people, eyes, people who came from around the world to protest what was happening. But also because I so love Russell Beebe, our local sculptor, Native American and his totem, we are here. That's been on the plaza and now in our library, have a library. So that became symbolic. So this work is a bit more difficult to connect with because it is symbolic and that's the difference. Johnson, my neighbor from across the street for 44 years. So I would paint with a brush, the image that I wanted him to cut and then he would cut and then we would go back and forth and then he would route for the different depths. But now I've been doing it myself. So I'm handling it differently. So I start with plywood and I disappoint people in the lumber yard because I like the roughest and the most beat up boards because I love the texture of the wood and I like to emphasize it and I'm very capable of cutting and shaping it with my little skill saw. And then I don't do the routing. I'm afraid of that tool. So I use my wood carving tools and I cut out and layer the wood. So that's kind of the difference. When Peter and I married in 65, 1965, we built a very, we could only build a very simple, simple house and with a choice, big studio or big kitchen. So it's obvious. And then for a long time because the kitchen's on the other wall of the studio, Peter would accuse me of cooking with a smoke alarm. After China and India, I stayed in that region a while. I wasn't doing global hopping, but I went to Bali, to Java, to Sumatra. I went to Borneo, which was fantastic and Papua New Guinea. So those were the areas after India that I went to and then came Latin America and then came Africa because I found the African influence in Latin America, especially in Nicaragua. And loved what was happening with Nicaragua, the political art, the artist, the mural painting just loved it and built friendships there with other artists and so on. So then I began to go to Africa and actually my African American woman artist sent me there. They said, you know, you go. But also going to professional meetings where there were faculty from other countries at the, what is, through the Art College Art Association and through the National Art Education Association. And they said, you come we'll make sure you meet woman artists and so on. So that was my first foray into Africa. I was a dean, a man from the University of Benin in Nigeria and he did indeed. And I just loved what I was seeing and learning and so on. So, you know, it's just been, you know, just exciting to have all these, you know, experiences and but to give these artists visibility and very often too, I would be invited, I got grants from the US government. Oh, I forgot the cultural aspect to teach there, to do little workshops and then Eritrea. I got stuck on Eritrea, including during peace and then during war. So I was going to camps, camps for dislocated people, seeing what war does to people, seeing the tragedy but also seeing how they use their artists, how their artists documented the war and these were the women artists I documented and feel so proud of. Eritrean artists in war and peace and then the specific women and so on. And then eventually to donate all the paintings I did about Eritrea back to Eritrea and to being welcomed by the government and so on. So yeah, so that was a big, I think 26 paintings they received from me but they brought me back. They wanted to show me how they would be exhibited. Now they would move around the country to their different universities and then have a public home and so on. So what could be better? Just like that. And so I feel pleased that I've been able to do these things.