Born in Watford City, North Dakota in 1985, artist Teresa Baker lives and works in Los Angeles, and she’s an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in the Great Plains.

The most comprehensive presentation of her work to date, this solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis includes paintings, bronze sculptures, woven baskets and works on paper.

Baker is celebrated for her large-scale abstract paintings on shaped pieces of artificial turf. In these unique works, she brushes and sprays on acrylic paint, applying linear designs with natural and synthetic fiber yarns.

She also incorporates materials such as willow, buffalo and deer hide, tree bark, corn husks and natural and artificial sinew into her compositions. These dynamic and colorful works often resemble vast landscapes, inviting viewers to imagine prairie vistas and bird’s-eye views of grasslands.

Drawing from her Native American Mandan/Hidatsa heritage, Baker’s singular vision of shape, color and texture reveals abstraction’s narrative capacities. Through her work, Baker invigorates and expands European and American modern painting histories, offering a visionary approach to abstraction.