Throughout my more than 40 year career, I have always expressed in my paintings the thoughts, feelings, experiences I have about the human condition: about human struggles, human rights, women’s issues, voting rights, independence. In the mid-1970s, just after I completed my BFA, I witnessed the crushing of human rights, the slaughter of people, including friends, through the years of the Ethiopian military government’s ‘Red Terror’.

I fortunately survived that devastating time and became committed to creating ‘good trouble’ with my art – blending social issues with aesthetic explorations of the Ethiopian Amharic script images. My intention has always been, through art, to create a visual path toward connection, mutual respect, to encourage people to use art to discover what makes us tick. For me, art can lead us gently into the unknown, nudge us from our habits of mind and habits of seeing. Just as I work juxtaposing mastery and uncertainty, I want my art to make us question what we know, to move into the unknown, and to make the uncertain more inviting.

I use lots of primary, and also secondary, colors – combine them at times in unpredictable ways – to show how all colors emerge from the base color of our shared earth, how colors can live together in a dynamic composition, even those we view as less palatable.  There are, after all, no ‘bad’ colors!

I am breaking apart and reconstructing the shapes of letters through
distortion and exaggeration to create a portrait of the complex rhythms of the human drama.