The Land and Its Shadow
Teresa Baker, Twenty Minutes to Sunset, 2023. Spray paint, acrylic, buckskin, yarn, and artificial sinew on artificial turf, 118 x 105 inches. Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp. Photo by Jacob Phillip.
Teresa Baker’s newest solo exhibition, Twenty Minutes to Sunset at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, consists of seven large-scale works—her largest to date—made in the last three years. Two are double-sided and hang from the ceiling in the middle of the gallery; the rest occupy the surrounding walls. The most dominant element in the work is astroturf—the strange and commercially available fake grass that comes in green, of course, but also an array of hues from brown and red to blue and gray. Baker cuts the colorful turf into irregular shapes and leverages its intrinsic qualities: for instance, it clings to thread, so when she wants to introduce long lines or discrete squiggles, she uses yarn, and the rough plastic helps hold it in place. Where she paints a section, she lets the original turf peek through, producing mottled two-tone passages reminiscent of Milton Avery and Mark Rothko.
Teresa Baker, Expanse, 2023. Acrylic, yarn, beads, willow, and artificial sinew on artificial turf, 108 x 71 inches. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp. Photo by Jacob Phillip.
Baker favors curves and rounded edges over hard lines and boxes. Her palette is a mix of vivid, earthy colors, and her work is abstract, but not entirely. She adds seed pods, sticks, leather, and other elements to her surfaces. In Expanse (2023), two diagonals of tiny twigs form an “X.” Beads rest on top of each twig to resemble flowers, figures, or torches. In the show’s titular work, Twenty Minutes to Sunset (2023), a thick, curving swath of yarn suggests a river. Thinner woolly lines criss-cross Shift in the Clouds (2024) to imply a mountain range.
Baker is a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara), which are based in the Great Plains in North Dakota. Now, she lives and works in Los Angeles, where artificial grass abounds, but she grew up living in national parks where her father was a superintendent. Her mark-making feels informed, at least in part, by the style of imagery on leather shields and warriors’ shirts from the Great Plains in the early 1800s that told heroic tales with bold, minimal, repeated forms. At the same time, her manipulation of plastic vegetation is reminiscent of collage: Pablo Picasso’s Cubist coffee-and-newspaper scene, Still Life with Chair Caning (1912), incorporated a piece of coated commercial cloth printed to imitate the weave of a café chair.
Teresa Baker, Shift in the Clouds, 2024. Acrylic, yarn, and willow on artificial turf, 70 x 152 inches. Courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp. Photo by Jacob Phillip.
However, Baker does not seem particularly interested in the Cubist abandonment of a single viewpoint. Her primary influence appears to be nature’s intricacies and wide open spaces. Her investment in astroturf, then, could feel contradictory—artificial turf is far from neutral and more allied with the cement truck and habitat loss than, say, inspiration found walking by rivers among graceful tall grasses. In discussing her work, Baker offers that she chanced upon rolls of the synthetic material in Home Depot during her search for a ground that could hold its own shape and was not as established in art history as a canvas. Baker elegantly ennobles the material through a remarkable economy of means, working in the time-honored tradition of making something new from what culture provides. Living as we do in what is arguably the Plastic Age, synthetic fibers and materials are inescapably pervasive. What else should an artist use? That Baker successfully uses something artificial to make a beautiful, double-edged call to Midwestern terrain demonstrates inventiveness—even brilliance.
Symbolically, especially in the context of contested land, astroturf has more sinister associations. It suggests colonial lies and insults paved into the landscape of the West: dubious Spanish, French, and American claims on the Great Plains; the removal of Indigenous people to create national parks in the US while telling a fabrication about previously unpopulated lands; the caricature of Indigenous people; the bigoted and false insistence that they are unsophisticated and arcane, not part of a technologically informed present or future. Baker’s astroturf compositions are ultimately much more loaded than they first might appear. Her work seems to evoke both the grassy plains landscape and its conceptual shadow—the bend and sway of riverbank reeds, as well as the cultural homogenization, historical distortions, and disingenuous artificial alternatives as replacements of what was before.
Teresa Baker, Field Notes, 2022. Willow, spray paint, and yarn on artificial turf, 74 x 120 inches. Gochman Family Collection, courtesy of the artist and de boer, Los Angeles & Antwerp. Photo by Jacob Phillip.
Teresa Baker: Twenty Minutes to Sunset is on view at the American Academy of Arts and Letters from April 10 through July 3, 2025.
Edited by Jubilee Park
