Teresa Baker

Pulling Up The Prairie

April 24 - May 29, 2021

de boer gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition and limited edition publication of mixed media wall works by Teresa Baker. In Baker’s first exhibition with de boer, the Los Angeles-based artist presents a collection of large-scale works evoking art historical antecedents from Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, and Ree Morton as well as a traditional loom, map-making, and the natural topography of the Northern Plains. Pulling Up the Prairie is a play on Ofelia Zepeda’s poem “Pulling Down the Clouds” and the idea of trying to grasp something so vast, something so ephemeral, and take it with you. 

Honoring both her modern aesthetic and the materials and cultural metaphors of her childhood, Baker transforms synthetic materials into works that reference territories’ irregular shapes. The looping marks, made with materials like yarn and string, suggest mapping. These works are drawn from memories in the grand Northern Plains where she is from and time spent exploring, walking, looking, and working. The materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships are guided by the Artists’ Mandan/Hidatsa culture to explore how identity can relate to innate objects. 

Baker’s hand-stitched patterning, painting, beading, and soldering create a recognizable style in rhythm with the artwork’s overall asymmetrical shape. The organization of these materials within the invented picture plane creates environmental psychology that suggests environments form identities. This discovery is represented as experimental expressions and compositions that reveal deep and mature thinking combined with a personal narrative. As a momentary space or state, the works can be described by their vagueness, hybridity, and ease, with the incredible potential for disruption and revolutionary change. 

Teresa Baker (b. 1985)is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in Western, ND. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Interface Gallery, Oakland in 2019, and Gray Contemporary, Houston in 2018. She has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay area at venues such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa, the Wattis Institute, Kiria Koula, Et al., and The Luggage Store Gallery. In 2016 she had her first solo museum show with the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX. She was the 2020 Native American Fellow for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation, Tournesol Award Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, 2013–2014 Artist-in-Residence at The MacDowell Colony, 2015. Baker received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA from Fordham University.

Video | Artist Talk: Teresa Baker in Conversation with Dr. Scott Manning Stevens

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