Teresa Baker was raised throughout the Midwest in North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, and Nebraska but considers the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota her home. Growing up, Baker watched her father, a superintendent of national parks, work to bring Native American thinking and teaching back to those lands. While Baker describes her work as not overtly or obviously from an indigenous artist, the materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships she uses are guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture and a slow, thoughtful process of making in the studio.
Through a mixed-media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Baker creates abstract landscapes exploring vast spaces of the Great Plains that appear empty at first glance but, upon closer inspection, are filled with movement and life. Baker’s work Abundant, commissioned by Sculpture Milwaukee, marks the artist’s first outdoor sculpture. Unlike Baker’s abstract landscape “paintings,” made with colored astroturf and yarn, this sculpture of a woven basket is directly inspired by the materials and handicrafts of her tribes, grounding the piece in a long cultural tradition that places meaning and beliefs around objects.
Teresa Baker was raised throughout the Midwest in North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, and Nebraska but considers the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota her home. Growing up, Baker watched her father, a superintendent of national parks, work to bring Native American thinking and teaching back to those lands. While Baker describes her work as not overtly or obviously from an indigenous artist, the materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships she uses are guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture and a slow, thoughtful process of making in the studio.
Through a mixed-media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Baker creates abstract landscapes exploring vast spaces of the Great Plains that appear empty at first glance but, upon closer inspection, are filled with movement and life. Baker’s work Abundant, commissioned by Sculpture Milwaukee, marks the artist’s first outdoor sculpture. Unlike Baker’s abstract landscape “paintings,” made with colored astroturf and yarn, this sculpture of a woven basket is directly inspired by the materials and handicrafts of her tribes, grounding the piece in a long cultural tradition that places meaning and beliefs around objects.
Teresa Baker was raised throughout the Midwest in North Dakota, Montana, Oklahoma, and Nebraska but considers the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota her home. Growing up, Baker watched her father, a superintendent of national parks, work to bring Native American thinking and teaching back to those lands. While Baker describes her work as not overtly or obviously from an indigenous artist, the materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships she uses are guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture and a slow, thoughtful process of making in the studio.
Through a mixed-media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Baker creates abstract landscapes exploring vast spaces of the Great Plains that appear empty at first glance but, upon closer inspection, are filled with movement and life. Baker’s work Abundant, commissioned by Sculpture Milwaukee, marks the artist’s first outdoor sculpture. Unlike Baker’s abstract landscape “paintings,” made with colored astroturf and yarn, this sculpture of a woven basket is directly inspired by the materials and handicrafts of her tribes, grounding the piece in a long cultural tradition that places meaning and beliefs around objects.
