Teresa Baker, Resident Artist Lecture 2026

Teresa Baker gives a lecture talking about her painting and drawing process. Baker works in a wide range of material, with a specific focus on artificial turf. Baker is drawn to this material’s rigidity and the way it holds yarn. Other materials Baker has explored include willow, hay bale rope, buckskin, and cotton wood bark. Her interest in the landscape and the materials she works with comes from her relationship to the land, specifically being born and raised on the Fort Berthold Reservation in central North Dakota, where she is a part of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations. This upbringing and her ties to the northern plains landscape has instilled Baker with strong bonds to the land, and has grounded her work as an artist. Baker continuously considers expansive methods of working with material and ways to express the artist’s hand through it. Other explorations within her work include: the relationship between artificial and natural materials and how this relationship reflects adaptability in humanity and culture; the life and decay; the consideration of beauty in harshness; the importance of imperfections; and the constant effort and hope to make work feel visceral. Baker then goes on to talk about the importance of working with abstraction and design as a site from which to explore the endless symbols of identities. Baker seeks to continuously explore these symbolic identities with every single work, as each piece–with its unlimited possibilities of the materials the artist works from– is also a reaction to the last. Baker ends her lecture with advice to the participants: to be open to the unexpected when things don’t go their way, and to also understand their meaning of “home,” as the landscapes they have an intimate relationship with may become a grounding force.