Teresa Baker’s “Shift in the Clouds” at the Arts Club of Chicago

Teresa Baker, “Headlands,” 2017, yarn on artificial turf, 97″ x 107.5″. Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM/Photo: Zara Yost

The synthetic and natural materials attached, sewn, and fused together in Teresa Baker’s “Shift in the Clouds” stand out against the white walls of the gallery. The exhibition features thirteen of Baker’s abstract landscapes in the first floor public exhibition space of the Arts Club of Chicago.

Artificial turf, yarn, willow, buffalo hide and paint create tapestries of plains, fields and terrain that simulate a vertical aerial view of the American landscape. Teresa Baker’s works are spacious, textured and tactile, imbued with her Indigenous heritage and the ancestral territories and landscapes she has observed throughout her life.

Baker, who was adopted into the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes of western North Dakota, received her MFA from the California College of Arts in San Francisco in 2013 and has had many solo and group exhibitions since then. Her most recent solo exhibitions can be found at de boer in Los Angeles, California; Halsey McKay in East Hampton, New York; and the Scottsdale Museum of Art, Scottsdale, Arizona.

Teresa Baker, “Shift in the Clouds,” 2024, willow, yarn, acrylic, suede on artificial grass, 62″ x 150″/Photo: Zara Yost

Baker’s abstract works emphasize the disconnect created by the surveying of land versus the lived experience of that land. Her father worked for the National Park Service, and this allowed Baker to spend most of her childhood outdoors, exploring nature and traveling through the landscape. The use of turf as land or territory symbolizes America’s colonial history and what the land claims for itself—which is as false as the polyethylene used in the fibers of artificial turf—as well as Baker’s own interpretations of America, such as the waste or remnants of land American lawmakers have allowed Native Americans to occupy and the ways the United States has treated these lands and Indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism and systemic racism.

Scott Manning Stevens, a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and Harvard graduate student, says in an interview with Baker, “(Baker’s work) has the abstraction of space. When it’s not a lived experience, but a controlled, legislated experience (for example, when it’s state boundaries, the boundaries of a reservation or allotments – all of those forms come to mind,” and “When I turn to the notion of place as an embodied notion of the space that one experiences, in which one lives and travels, I think about (Baker’s work) in very different terms.” Stevens says, “It’s all simulacra, all artificiality, and thus intentional, intervened, not accidental or found.”

Teresa Baker, “Field Notes,” 2022, willow, spray paint, and yarn on artificial turf, 74″ x 120″. Gochman Family Collection/Photo: Zara Yost

Baker’s work is both truth and history, brimming with tribal narratives and cultural influences. Using organic and inorganic materials such as willow rods, pieces of artificial turf, solder, sinew, threads of yarn, and tufts of buffalo hide, Baker approaches the tradition of American landscape painting in her own way, bypassing the strict and often limiting constraints of a conventional canvas. It is as if Baker has ripped the works from the dirt and attached them to the wall. Baker often covers her works with sinew, reinforcing ancestral customs and bringing the artistry of longstanding, indigenous practices into focus. In doing so, Baker also references the tactile, human connection to the roads, highways, and boundaries of the landscape she depicts in her works. Like the skin of the United States, Baker has skinned the American landscape and elegantly hung it for us to see and contemplate.

“Teresa Baker, Shift in the Clouds” runs through August 16 at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 East Ontario.