AFRICA
WOMEN'S ART WOMEN'S LIVES
by Betty LaDuke

"This broadly conceived and geographically far-ranging reconnaissance effort will prove invaluable for scholars desiring to accomplish more particularistic studies of African women and their arts in the future. LaDuke has located for us named, independent women artists as well as art collectives as geographically disparate as Mali, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Togo, Zimbabwe, and Eritrea....  The categories of art-making LaDuke documents are equally broad-ranging: from pottery, basket manufacture, house painting and leather decoration to paintings, sculpture, and political art..... Strengthened by her warm, personal encounters with these artists, LaDuke has sensitively provided (perhaps for the first time) a view of women artists' consciousness of their own agencyand a sense of themselves as contributing to social/political change and the dismantling of old boundaries and stereotypes"..............                                                  -Dr Mikelle Omari-Obayemi                                                    Professor African Art History                                                    Director, African-American Studies Program                                                    University of Arizona, Tucson

*  In Africa, women's passion to create is evident during times of peace as well as war, under favorable circumstances
    as well as the most difficult and dangerous imaginable
*  Their media of expression can be naturally derived or imported
*   It can vary from monumental stone sculpture to intricate beadwork, or from painting with mud to oil and acrylic
*   Across the African continent, from Timbuktu, Mali to Harare, Zimbabwe or Asmara Eritrea, whether women
     weave, sew, sketch, paint, create fabric applique or stone sculptures, their art work often incorporates the duality
      of myth and reality as they express their hopes, fears, humor, and frustrations   

Betty LaDuke
  -- Author-illustrator of this volume, was trained under prominent African American artists Elizabeth Cartlett and
      Charles White.
  --  Her extensive travels since the 1950s have deepened and enhanced her appreciation of world culture and
       women's art, the dual subjects of all her publications
  --   She has been the recipient of the Ziegfeld Award from the United States Society of Education through Arts, and
         of the Governors Arts Award of the State of Oregon.
  --   A painter who resides in Ashland, Oregon, where she teaches at Southern Oregon State College, LaDuke is the
         author of Africa Through The Eyes of  Women Artists and Women Artists: Multi-Cultural Visions  

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