Betty LaDuke
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Turtle Wisdom: Personal, Political, Playful
ScienceWorks is please to welcome Betty LaDuke to The Art in STEAM Gallery. Ms. LaDuke's Turtle Wisdom: Personal, Political, Playful - a collection of shaped, carved, and painted wood panels - will be on display during the months of November and December. We welcome Ms. LaDuke herself to the First Friday Art Walks on November 1 and December 6. Ms. LaDuke will also attend a special evening of art and music on November 8, titled Full Circle: Turtle Wisdom.
Artist's statement:
Slowly, as we emerged from our pandemic isolation (2021), my doorway opened and 20 TURTLES gradually appeared in my Ashland, Oregon studio. While some TURTLES have been waiting for me in sketchbooks created decades ago in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, new ones now evolved. TURTLES became my symbolic storytellers, commenting on the events currently reshaping our lives.
My imagination awakened as with a jigsaw I shaped wood boards into a variety of TURTLE forms. The stories they each told began with a rough painted outline before sharp gouges defined their interior forms into various depths and textures. Finally, their wood-thirsty surfaces received many layers of acrylic paint. Completed colorful TURTLES now standing on my paint splattered studio floor seemed like huggable companions or wise elders depending on their story-telling expressions. The TURTLES now number 33 and more are coming. They are Personal, Political and Playful. The Turtles have come to invite conversation rather than to provide answers.
First Friday Art Walk
Friday, November 1st and December 6th, 5 - 7 pm
Join us for an evening of Art, Science, and Wonder!
Meet the artist.
Interactive programming and light refreshments available.
Free admission.
Full Circle: Turtle Wisdom
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Friday, November 8
Reception 6–8pm
Performances at 6:30 and 7:30pm
Experience an unforgettable evening of Art & Music featuring stunning artwork from Betty LaDuke’s Turtle Wisdom series, and the world premiere of Full Circle: Turtle Wisdom, a mesmerizing new work for gong orchestra composed by Terry Longshore. Performers will include Longshore, the SOU Percussion Ensemble, and students of Longshore’s SOU Honors College course, “Making Music.”
Admission is $10.00
Free for SOU Faculty, Staff, Students with Photo ID, and ScienceWorks Members.
Friday, September 6th and October 4th, 5 - 7 pm
Join us for an evening of Art, Science, and Wonder!
ScienceWorks Museum will be hosting our First Friday Art Walk on September 6th and October 4th, featuring the works of landscape and architecture photographer Bill Saltzstein. Saltzstein will be showcasing photographs of the Aurora Borealis from the perspective of Lofoten, Norway and Ashland, Oregon. Interactive programming and light refreshments available.
Free admission.
Artist’s Statement:
I am continually fascinated by the quality of light and texture at the extremes of sunrise and sunset, and work to capture the quiet dynamics and possibilities of those special moments. The aurora images present a magical light and texture that is like no other.
Artist’s Background:
Bill is a recently retired Electrical Engineer, and photography has long been a part of life to exercise his ‘right-brain’. He began with film and B&W darkroom techniques in grade school, taking the photos with his father’s twin-lens Argoflex camera. He was the sole photographer for his highschool yearbook and weekly newspaper - shooting, printing, and processing literally hundreds of feet of film. After school he 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 living in Ashland, OR, and has exhibited in 9 different juried shows in the past 3 years. He has self-published books of photography, and works with several non-profit organizations to contribute images for their marketing and media needs.
Friday, July 5th, 5 - 7 pm 
Join us for an evening of Art, Science, and Wonder!
ScienceWorks Museum will be hosting our First Friday Art Walk on July 5th, featuring the works of Southern Oregon Plein air painter Sarah F. Burns. 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. Interactive programming, snacks and light refreshments available.
Free admission.
About the Artist:
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.
On view now are Bovine Beach: July, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. ScienceWorks is fortunate enough to host the unveiling of Bovine Beach: July 2024. Visitors are invited to learn about local native plants and even create a landscape of Vesper Meadow through our livestream installation!
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About Vesper Meadow:
The Vesper Meadow Education Program (VM) mission is to inspire a cultural of land stewardship and nature connection. We paint the picture of resilient communities and ecosystems with hands-on programing 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 issues of social justice.
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 are working in collaboration with community partners to establish an Indigenous-led network to fulfill self-determined goals of Native people and to enhance restoration and education efforts throughout Southwest Oregon.
Through bringing together a 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.
June 2024
ScienceWorks is pleased to announce the reception for Shoshanah Dubiner’s art Friday, June 7th from 5-7 pm. Select works from Dubiner’s Inspired by Biology collection will be on display at ScienceWorks from May through June 2024. The Pollinator Project, a series of paintings created for The Farm at Southern Oregon University, will also be on display. Programming in collaboration with our community partners such as Ashland Independent Film Fest. The artist will be in attendance and available to discuss her work. Snacks, beer, and wine available.
Free admission.
Brought to you in part by Ashland Gallery Association.
About the Artist:
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’s 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 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 OLLI classes about patterns in nature, and created outdoor art about pollinators, pollen and plants for The Farm at Southern Oregon University. 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.
Reproductions of Shoshanah’s work are available here
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