Teresa Baker

From Joy To JOy To Joy

August 26 – October 14, 2023
de boer (Los Angeles)

de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present From Joy to Joy to Joy, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based Teresa Baker, her second with the gallery. Baker uses artificial turf as a ground for works that reference abstract expressionist, cubist, and postminimalist movements, as well as territories and art of Indigenous peoples.

From Joy to Joy to Joy is a quote from Li-Young Lee’s poem “From Blossoms” that succinctly mirrors Baker’s attention to the evanescent quality of beautiful moments in life. The poem’s preceding line reads: “There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background.” For many of the works in the show, it is as if Baker has transposed this sensation directly into the materials. Her combinations of colorful paints and yarns with artificial turf call to mind the shifts of bright sun on hills as green gives way to brown, or the pinks and reds of a sunset. They evoke the lands where Baker lives and has lived, and the specific seasons in which the work was created.

Nature has always been a catalyst for Baker, who grew up in the Northern Plains on sacred and historical grounds where her father was the first American Indian Superintendent of Little Bighorn Battlefield, Chickasaw National Recreation Area, and Mt. Rushmore. Surrounded by sprawling landscapes, she attended educational exhibitions, and listened to storytelling from elders. This background directly influences the way she combines shapes, colors, and textures to create a language informed by both traditional and contemporary cultures but ultimately all her own.

ABOUT TERESA BAKER
Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) B. 1985 Watford City, ND

Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials together, Baker creates abstracted landscapes that explore vast space, and how we move, see and explore within them. The materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships are guided by Baker’s Mandan/Hidatsa culture. In her practice, Baker imbues innate objects with culture and identity.

Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) B. 1985 Watford City, ND) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Baker has had recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco; Interface Gallery, Oakland; and Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX, Group exhibitions include Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; di Rosa, Napa, CA; Marin MoCA, Novato,CA, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, a 2022 Artist-in-Residence at FOGO Islands Arts in Newfoundland, and the recipient of the 2020 Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation. Baker was an Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, and a Tournesol award Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. The artist's work was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS, and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, the Forge Collection, NY and The Tia Collection, Santa Fe. In 2023 Baker’s work will be included in ‘Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living’ at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA the sixth iteration of the biennial exhibition.

Selected Works

PRESS

Installation Views

ARTISTS