Willow Creek, 2025, yarn and buffalo hide on astroturf, 245 x 154 cm

Teresa Baker »Willow Creek«

Focus

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 colour relationships are guided by Baker’s Mandan/Hidatsa culture. In her practice, Baker imbues innate objects with culture and identity.

Teresa Baker’s practice is rooted in abstraction, where she engages with place, land, peoples, and history through material and form. Her work often begins with shape as a point of departure, using it as a way to guide both process and meaning. Willow Creek, created specifically for the window at Nordenhake focus, reflects this approach.

For this piece, Baker pushed shape to a more exaggerated state, allowing it to shift and evolve over time. Working on the ground with yarn, she moved between negotiations of colour and form, responding intuitively to the changing composition. The inner shapes guide the eye across the work, oscillating between references to field marks in the landscape and textural, gestural movements. Planes overlap and recede, creating a rhythm that mirrors the fluid relationship between natural forms and abstraction.

Through this process, Baker continues her exploration of how land and lived histories can be expressed through abstraction, giving form to both memory and presence.

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Teresa Baker (1985) was born in Watford City, North Dakota and is a Mandan/Hidatsa artist who currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes

Baker is currently having a solo exhibition at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Previous prominent solo exhibitions include American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, COMA Gallery, Sydney (both 2025); The Arts Club of Chicago; Broadway Gallery, New York (both 2024), de boer, Los Angeles (2023, 2021); Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton (2023); Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona (2022); Pied-á-terre, San Francisco (2021). In 2016 she had her first solo museum show with The Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont.

In October 2025, her work will be presented in a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. Previously, she has exhibited in group shows at Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels (2025); Prospect.6, New Orleans (2024); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park (both 2023); Ballroom Marfa, Texas, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, California (both 2022).

Her work is represented in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; the Forge Collection, New York; and The Tia Collection, Santa Fe.

Baker has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Guggenheim Foundation in 2025, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Fogo Island Arts, both in 2022. She was the recipient of the Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation in 2020, The Tournesol Award Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2013–2014 and Artist in Residence at The MacDowell Colony in 2015.

Baker holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Fordham University.