They are our contemporary goddesses. Survivors of malnutrition, political oppression, even massacres, they block the movement of armed military personnel with sticks, stones, and their bodies to protect children. The heroic stories of women, young and old, have also been retold on Oregon radio and television, decade after decade, beginning in the 1960s with the water hosing and spitting on children, struggling for their civil rights and school integration in Birmingham, Alabama. These scenes have also inspired my paintings Play Free and End of the Whitey Myth , filled with anger and rage, mine and theirs. Traveling has been an integral component of my life and art.
Travel is always a challenge.
The challenge continues when I return home to my Oregon studio and begin the process of recreating my diverse cultural experiences into an art form that reaches beyond the moment, for a universal context, as I explore what it is to be human in this world today. Observing people's direct dependence on the food they produce from the earth and around the earth, and sketching the plowing of land in India with oxen in preparation for planting rice, or chopping weeds around millet seedlings in Cameroon, Africa, eating from palm leaf plates or calabash bowls have also been important formative experiences. Next I. Identity a.