For more than 60 years, Betty LaDuke has traversed the globe as an artist and activist, bringing her sketchbook and camera to hundreds of villages in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as to remote Papa New Guinea and Borneo. These experiences have inspired LaDuke’s large panels exhibited in hundreds of art centers and museums across the United States. They also appear in unexpected places, like at entrance to airports in Portland and Medford, Oregon, where her large colorful cutouts of local farm workers greet arriving and departing passengers.

Nearly four years in the making and shaped by the experiences of the Almeda Fire in southern Oregon and social justice protests, LaDuke’s series of vibrantly colored wooden panels are also alloyed with climate change, school shooting traumas, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Fire, Fury, & Resilience: Totem Witnesses and Turtle Wisdom” opens Tuesday, March 29, at Grants Pass Museum of Art. Hyla Lipson, director of the museum, has come to anticipate a lot of insight into current events from LaDuke’s works, with overarching themes as well as subtle hints of current events, such as the COVID-19 vaccine and the attitudes people held toward wearing masks or social distancing during the pandemic.