Featured Artist

For more than 60 years, Betty LaDuke has traveled the globe as an artist and activist, taking her sketchbook and camera to villages in Latin America, Asia, and Africa as well as to remote Papua New Guinea and Borneo. These experiences inspire the large acrylic paintings, prints, and panels she exhibits in art centers and museums around the world. Fiercely independent, LaDuke rarely puts her work up for sale, believing it should be accessible to all. Born in the Bronx, New York, LaDuke received scholarships to the University of Denver; the Cleveland Institute of Art; and the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico. In 1953-1956, connecting with Mexico’s dynamic mural painters Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo—was a major formative experience. 

After completing a Master’s in Printmaking at California State University in 1964, LaDuke taught at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon from 1964-1996, retiring as a Professor of Art Emeritus. LaDuke’s international advocacy for the work of women artists began with her first sabbatical to India in 1972. In the years that followed, cultural explorations became the basis for her art organized as circulating exhibits: India Impressions; China, an Outsider's Inside View; Chiapas, Mexico, Land and Liberty; Africa, Myth, Magic, and Reality and Bringing the World Together.

Select works from LaDuke's Turtle Wisdom: Personal, Political, Playful were on display at ScienceWorks November through December 2024. 

Bill is an electrical engineer by training, and photography has long been a part of his life to exercise his right brain. He was initially trained in black-and-white darkroom photography techniques in grade school, taking the photos with his father’s twin-lens Argoflex. In high school, he was the sole photographer for his yearbook and weekly newspaper—shooting, printing, and processing hundreds of feet of film. At the same time, he also worked as a darkroom assistant in a color photo studio specializing in portraiture and aerial photography. Today Bill is primarily a landscape and architecture photographer. He has exhibited in 5 different juried shows in the past 2 years. He has completed several self-published books of photography and is currently working with the Peregrine Fund and the Perelman Performing Arts Center to provide images for their marketing and media needs.

Select works featuring the Aurora Borealis from the perspective of Lofoten, Norway, and Ashland, Oregon were on display at ScienceWorks September through October 2024. 

Artist's Statement 

"I am continually fascinated by the quality of light and texture at the extremes of sunrise and sunset. I work to capture the quiet feeling and possibilities of those special moments."

Southern Oregon plein air painter Sarah F. Burns has spent the past 6 years painting at Vesper Meadow, a biocultural restoration preserve and community education site in the Cascades near Howard Prairie.

She documents a variety of different habitats of this 1000-acre parcel, in every season. Science and art collide in the featured body of work in this show, Bovine Beach: July, where Sarah creates a painting every year in July to track the restoration of Latgawa Creek.

Bovine Beach: July 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 were on display at ScienceWorks July through August, along with the unveiling of July 2024. 

About Vesper Meadow:

"The Vesper Meadow Education Program (VM) mission is to inspire a culture of land stewardship and nature connection. We paint the picture of resilient communities and ecosystems with hands-on programming at our flagship location, the 1000-acre Vesper Meadow Restoration Preserve, where stewards and students work on long-term efforts for ecological restoration, climate resiliency, scientific monitoring of rare species and biodiversity, and community projects for reconnection of the human-land relationship. Programs address our society’s need for holistic thinkers by integrating diverse learning perspectives and practicing solutions-based approaches to address climate change and social justice issues.

Core to our mission is the belief that ecological restoration is synonymous with cultural revival. We partner with Tribes of record (evidenced by ceded lands, treaties, and case law) and work in collaboration with community partners to establish an Indigenous-led network to fulfill the self-determined goals of Native people and to enhance restoration and education efforts throughout Southwest Oregon.

Through bringing together various ways of thinking and understanding the world with tangible projects that demonstrate best practices during a time of climate change, we are working for mutual healing of the human-land relationship."

Shoshanah Dubiner is the child of European immigrants who instilled a love of the arts and learning in their daughter. She started drawing and painting as a child and attended Saturday morning art classes at the Cleveland Art Museum and then the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. Living in Florence, Italy as a high school exchange student in 1960—surrounded by Renaissance art and a people who loved art—was one of the greatest gifts she ever received. Her years studying the humanities at the University of California Berkeley, Harvard and Brandeis honed her strong analytic skills while leaving her powers of imagination intact. After earning a MFA in Theater Design, Shoshanah worked as a costume designer for three years in Italy. In 1978, she became a California Arts Council Artist-in-Residence at the California Academy of Sciences and worked with scientists and researchers in various scientific disciplines.

A course in The Cell at Southern Oregon University (SOU) in 2007 got her interested in the cell and its structures. The world of the tiny captured her attention, and her artwork took a new direction: nature seen through the lens of the microscope and interpreted with myth and metaphor. Her work combined the scientist’s explanations of the universe with the poet’s and the visionary’s view. In 2008, she became an admirer of the books of Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, who gave her a profoundly new interpretation of life on Earth. When Margulis died in 2011, Shoshanah painted a tribute to that great woman scientist: Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis. With its bold colors and energetic forms that express Shoshanah’s enthusiasm for the material, living world, the painting was first shown at the memorial celebration for Margulis in 2012 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has since been published in Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway, in Critical Zones, published by ZKM Center for Art and Media; and other journals. More recently Shoshanah’s Protocells Triptych, created in collaboration with professor of Biomolecular Engineering David Deamer, was on loan at the Norris Center for Natural History at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Shoshanah has worked with students in the schools; taught classes at SOU's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute about patterns in nature; and created outdoor art about pollinators, pollen, and plants for The Farm at SOU. She is now working on a book of her artwork that shows how an artist transforms her life experience into images. Shoshanah’s goal is to keep painting as long as possible in order to show people how beautiful the earth is.

Select works from Dubiner’s Inspired by Biology collection, and The Pollinator Project, a series of paintings created for The Farm at Southern Oregon University, were on display at ScienceWorks May through June 2024.