Pain’s Palette, Life’s Lessons : Surgery helped Riua Akinshegun find her calling and focus her creative energies. Now she uses her artwork in unique healing sessions. : RIUA AKINSHEGUN

I was pleased to do the exhibit at the Mali National Museum, since I woke up artistically in Africa. I didn’t know that I was an artist until I went to Nigeria in 1974. So, it was very important when I came out of pain to go back and thank them for all the things they taught me, such as how to focus, how to deal with my pain and how to be comfortable in my own creativity.

Coming from the projects in Chicago, I never considered art an option. Before 1974, I was a revolutionary and an activist. I was fortunate enough to be in the leadership in Berkeley, and before the accident, I took art classes for fun.

Africa helped me redevelop my spirituality. Today, I think the spirituality oozes in my art--like my healing dolls. Society is not ready to deal with pain, so I do workshops both with children and adults. But for the last few years I’ve been working through Performing Tree, which is an art collective that places me in wheelchair-access public schools all over the county. The healing workshops, however, are conducted in my own studio or in more private settings and they are usually geared toward adults.

We make healing dolls because we all have some form of pain, whether it is spiritual, mental or physical. The participants decide what the dolls mean to them, and as they make the dolls, they learn to refocus and rechannel the pain. Every time they see the dolls, it will hopefully transport them to a private sanctuary. The process allows them to move away from the negative.

A few years ago, a dear friend, who is a writer and filmmaker, decided to come to my workshop. After years of perfect health, she had suddenly come down with a devastating illness. She was quite particular about the design of her doll and especially as it related to the legs, which was where she was suffering. She completed the doll and seemed to get well shortly thereafter.

I once interpreted art from the European perspective, but in Nigeria I was lucky enough to work with the Oshogobo artists and such international personalities as Twin Seven-Seven, Fela, Jimmy Solanke and many, many others.

In Africa, I found, you don’t choose a particular field until you’re almost 30. Now I say that I’m a sculptor, and not a disabled sculptor or a black sculptor. I have to fight within myself this European tendency to separate and categorize.

I’ve not been accepted into mainstream society, because my work is Africa-rooted. The art establishment always wants to put me off in folk or craft art. I started off with a form of craft, but people don’t give you a chance to change the door sign. But it’s not important to me anymore; it’s only important that my work creates something inside me that quivers when I finish.

My most significant accomplishment in the last five years has been the release from pain, which has allowed me to clean out all the clutter in my life. I am beginning to discover the woman who was dormant for 17 years. Even though I was a very productive person, I hadn’t touched the surface. This summer, I worked with 6,000 students at the Hollywood Bowl for one week.

But my injury has also taught me patience and humility. It also freed me of the need to accept the norm. We live in a society where everybody has to be young and beautiful. It was only after the accident that I became sexually free.

Sometimes I joke that I’m not an artist--I’m an art teacher. And there is some truth in that. I’m no longer able, at the age of 50, to teach all day and give all my energy to my art at night. It’s either one or the other.

All I want for the next half of my life is to do my art.