News release CAM. From July 14 through September 23, 2017 Coos Art Museum will feature paintings of Ashland, Oregon artist Betty LaDuke. LaDuke has a career stretching back more than sixty-five years as an active artist. In her most recent series Bountiful Harvest she celebrates Oregon’s agricultural bounty and the workers who help to produce it through their labor. The exhibition opens on Friday July 14 from 5 to 7pm with a free public reception and all are invited to attend. The works in Bountiful Harvest consist of shaped plywood painted in her characteristic bright and lively colors and depicting agricultural laborers. A resident of Ashland since 1964 when she took a job teaching job at Southern Oregon University, LaDuke has a long and distinguished record of exhibitions and honors. She has also been a world traveler where her encounters with the working people of many lands have reinforced a strong social conscience. In 2010 she was invited to spend time with the men and women who harvest the orchards, vineyards and farms of southern Oregon. This series of paintings is the result of that experience. “LaDuke’s work is illustrative and documentary, political and spiritual. It is not art for art’s sake…” (From the forward of Bountiful Harvest, From Land to Table, White Cloud Press, 2016).
