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   Decisions of the Heart; The Stories and Art of Future Akins is a production of KTXT-TV, Channel 5, a department of the division of the Office of the Provost  at Texas Tech University. 

   ��her art has the quality of flames on the water.�

Michael Ventura,
L.A. Times / Austin Observer

   Someone once said that an artist mainly needs three things:  taste, humor, and courage.  Which is right as far as it goes, but it leaves out one factor without which the others don�t amount to a hill of beans.  Perhaps even more than the rest of us an artist must have persistence, the simple bone-hard ability to endure.
   Artists live in their art, but their art is only part of their lives.  Like the rest of us, they have to suffer the slings and arrows of this world.  They have bad days, fall in and out of love, put up with hunger and cold and sleepless nights and grief and longing�And these things become the material from which their art is made, the gears and wheels that make it turn.  But it�s rare for the rest of us to be allowed to see any of these gears and wheels, which is one reason art, can so often be as baffling as magic.
   This film is about how one woman makes the magic work.  It takes us through her art and into her memories and thoughts and shows us a flesh-and-blood woman who has persisted at making art for a lifetime and managed, perhaps by accident, to make her life itself her finest creation.

Kurt Tidmore
Author, Ireland

   This film on the life and work of West Texas artist Future Akins embodies the phrase �The Personal is Political.�  We are introduced to a smart, funny, and humane woman whose personal losses and public triumphs define her as an artist and teacher.  The film articulates how art can be an investigation into political, social, and cultural identity that leads to healing, empowerment and just might help change the world.

Helen Klebesadel
Artist and Director of the Women�s Studies Consortium of the University of Wisconsin System

Decisions of the Heart



The Stories and Art
of Future Akins

Produced by
Doug Nelson
& Armando Rodriguez 

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