Artist Talk with Teresa Baker

Join us for a talk by artist Teresa Baker on Wednesday, March 18, at 6pm in the PAFA’s Rhoden Auditorium. Baker will introduce her work, including her 2026 Whitney Biennial installation, and then will be joined by Papermaker Clay Tenhula to present her edition project developed during her residency at Brodsky Center at PAFA.
 

REGISTER NOW
 

Baker employs found artificial and natural elements in expansive abstract collages whose monochromatic hues and constructed edges shape the viewer’s sense of space. Her compositional and montage processes reference notions of land, nature, craft and living traditions from her tribe, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, set in dialogue with the ephemeral, ersatz textures of everyday industrial materials.

Values such as honesty and intuition add to Baker’s academic formation within both the American and European modernist canons, defining a uniquely personal practice that embraces the immediacy of lived experience. The artist recognizes that ways of seeing formed during her upbringing on the Great Plains of North Dakota continue to influence her practice. Baker arrives at her compositions on store-bought artificial turf by using spray paint and acrylic colors, commercial yarn, and natural materials that are familiar to her—including willow, corn husk, sinew, and deer and buffalo hides—as drawing implements. She considers the inorganic colors of these ready-made supports to be the equivalent of the saturated intensity of the luminous hues that only nature can generate, and the ideal background for carrying through personally chosen elements as universal, abstract, and open-ended signs.

Baker draws on basketmaking and canoe construction techniques, gardening design, and quilt stitching—traditions practiced in her family across both her Indigenous and German heritages. By grounding her work in the knowledge and functional practices she knows, Baker creates a form of abstraction that is connected and universal, rather than constructed and idealized. Her work is also shaped by the reverence she was taught to exercise for the environment, and the responsibilities often expected of women toward land and nature.

Baker conceives of her work as landscape imagery. At the same time, she identifies abstract language as a source of boundlessness that inspires her to connect to contemporary cities and communities, extending her understanding of the world to her surroundings, where, in fact, artificial turf is even recommended as an ecological alternative for outdoor paces. Baker challenges herself to avoid repetitive formal solutions from one work to the next, experimenting with her techniques and strategies as a way to reflect the same spirit of adaptation that brought her family to adopt fabrics after hide, and AstroTurf after rugs.

Born in 1985, Baker lives and works in Livingston, MT. She is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in the Great Plains. She received her MFA from the California College of Arts in San Francisco, CA, in 2013, and a BA in Visual Arts from Fordham University in New York, in 2008; and took a Painting and Drawing Intensive at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2006. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ, and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. Her work is featured in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and has been included in group exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; and Marin MOCA, CA, among others.

Portrait of Teresa Baker by Airyka Rockefeller Photography, and photos of installation views at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO, by Izaiah Johnson.

REGISTER NOW