Grant Recipients Helen Frankenthaler Award for Painting Visual Arts 2026

Teresa Baker

Portrait of Teresa Baker. Baker smiles at the camera, sitting with her hands placed on top of each other resting over her crossed leg. She’s wearing black pants, a blue and white striped button up shirt with a bright orange jacket over it, and silver rings on each ring finger, one with lapis lazuli and the other a stone that resembles sunstone or amber. Behind Baker her work “Twenty Minutes to Sunset” appears in close detail.
Photo by Airyka Rockefeller.

Artist Statement

I have long been interested in the language of abstraction, which has put me on a path of working with, and exploring how materials talk. I quickly gravitated toward making shaped paintings as it automatically felt borderless, autonomous, and allowed for more ways to explore irregularity in all its forms. I began working with artificial turf in 2017 and since then it has remained my primary "canvas." Through a process-oriented and intuitive approach, I combine the artifice of AstroTurf with natural materials that are commonly used in my Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, such as willow and animal hides. It is through these relationships that I have been able to investigate how materials stand for and represent culture, landscape, and people, as well as how these materials, in combination with each other, form their own relationships and create a new language within each artwork. I find the beauty of abstraction to be in its vastness, its ability to poke at, and the open emotional responses it generates.

- December 2025

Biography

Teresa Baker is a visual artist and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in North Dakota. Raised in four different states throughout the Northern Plains and Midwest, the large landscapes of her youth imprinted ways of seeing that influence how she explores and develops her abstractions. Through a mixed media practice, intertwining artificial and natural materials as well as her Mandan/Hidatsa and German American roots, she creates landscapes that explore vast space and how we see, explore, and belong within them.

The most comprehensive presentation of Baker’s work to date was her solo exhibition Somewhere Between Earth and Sky (2025) at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, which included bronze sculptures, paintings, woven baskets, and works on paper. To create these pieces, she sprayed and brushed acrylic paint onto artificial turf, upon which she applied linear surface designs using natural and synthetic fibers. In these works, Baker weaves together organic and artificial elements—hides of hoofed animals, tree bark, corn husks, and both natural and artificial sinew—to create compositions that echo the vastness of prairie landscapes and grasslands.  

Baker’s other solo exhibitions include Twenty Minutes To Sunset, The Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2025); Shift In The Clouds, Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2024); Mapping The Territory, Broadway Gallery, New York, NY (2024); and From Joy to Joy to Joy, de boer, Los Angeles, CA (2023). Group exhibitions featuring Baker’s work include Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home, New Orleans, LA (2024) and Made In LA: Acts Of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023), among others. 

Baker is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2025), the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2022), The Ucross Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists and Writers (2020), and the Tournesol Award at The Headlands Center for the Arts (2013-2014). Baker has participated in residencies at Fogo Island Arts, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada (2022) and MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (2015). 

Baker holds an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts (2013) and a B.A. from Fordham University (2008).

Installation view of three large paintings in a triangle formation in a gallery space. The largest of the three is shaped like a shield and acts as the top point of the triangle, suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room. It is made of blue astroturf delineated with colorful yarn and paint, which form a variety of shapes, and seed pods that are stitched to the surface. It is mainly a deep red, which contrasts against the white walls of the room, but also includes violet, dark blue, orange, green, baby blue, and white. The other paintings are installed on parallel walls. On the right wall is a painting of a round green shape with a round, thick orange border surrounding it. Inside of the green is a blue squiggly shape that resembles a lake, as well as a number of pink lines and white and pink triangles spread throughout. There are also small lines and shapes on the orange border, including a blue squiggly line and four rectangular shapes stiched together, in red, white, yellow, and blue. On the opposite wall is an organic rectangular shape, predominantly in brown with a blue round shape in the center of it. A red “V” begins in each of the top corners and extends to the very middle of the blue, at which point the “V” turns into a red diagonal line that extends from the center of the painting to its bottom right corner.

Installation view of Twenty Minutes to Sunset at American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 2025. Photo by Charles Benton, courtesy of the artist, de boer, Los Angeles, CA, and Antwerp, Belgium.

Close up of “Move In A Pattern” installed on a white wall. A rectangular shape in football-stadium green with two semicircular, inward curves in the center of the horizontal top and bottom edges, which are outlined with blue yarn. The top indentation encompasses about the entire center of the artwork. The bottom indentation covers about two thirds making the bottom edges to more prominent. Beginning at the very left of the bottom indentation and running diagonal, reminiscent of a hammock that is twisted in the center, are three shapes that connect with one another. From bottom to top, they are brown yarn outlined in cream yarn, red year outlined in cream, and cream year outlined in red on one side only. The edges are decorated with yarn, buckskin, and artificial sinew, formed in various squiggly and/or linear patterns. Ten small white circular objects are spread out throughout the entirety of the work.

Move In A Pattern, 2025, buckskin, yarn, artificial sinew on AstroTurf, 60" x 118.5". Photo courtesy of the artist and COMA, Sydney, Australia.

Close up of “Waking”, a dark blue, wide irregular octagon canvas on astroturf installed on a white wall. From the top edge of the hexagon to the bottom is an organic shape painted in a washed-denim blue, which has 8 pod-like shapes inside of it in pink, red, green, blue, or beige, with a white or blue lip. Additional shapes and borders to shapes are spread throughout the work in varying colors of yarn, buckskin, or paint on top of AstroTurf.

Waking, 2024, yarn, buckskin, acrylic, and canvas on AstroTurf, 76.25" x 144.5". Photo by Ruben Diaz, courtesy of the artist and Broadway, New York, NY.

Close up of “Tracing the Memory”, a large AstroTurf artwork installed on a white gallery wall above a wooden floor. Asymmetrical geometric panels in deep green, teal, magenta, orange, red, and blue are stitched to one another with yarn and/or artificial sinew. Three ribbons made of buckskin hang off of the center of the piece.

Tracing The Memory, 2024, parfleche, acrylic, artificial sinew, yarn on AstroTurf, 84.5" x 68.75". Photo by Ruben Diaz, courtesy of the artist and Broadway, New York, NY.

Close up of “Of This Time”, a large red irregular pentadecagon made of AstroTurf installed on a white gallery wall. Light blue yarn with a black border, reminiscent of a map-view of a river, is stitched into the astroturf, running across from the bottom left of the artwork to the top right corner. Above and below the center of the ‘river’ are two green circles made of yarn, also stitched into the AstroTurf. Two pieces of cottonwood lay horizontal in the top left corner. Finally, resembling pipe cleaners, two thick pieces of fuchsia yarn with indigo, violet, and red spots throughout, run diagonal and parallel to one another from left to right.

Of This Time, 2024, acrylic, yarn, cottonwood on AstroTurf, 58" x 46.5". Photo by Ruben Diaz, courtesy of the artist and Broadway, New York, NY.

Close up of “Movements of The Land” a large organic 12-sided shape installed on a white gallery wall above a wooden floor. The shape’s body is predominantly a tennis court green, which has bright blue yarn stitched throughout in shapes that resemble roots. Red and orange yarn hangs off of the roots’ center in areas. There is gray yarn stitched throughout this section in vertical lines, as well as pieces of willow and hay bale rope. Bordering the tennis court green section with pink yarn, in the left and right corners of the artwork, are two irregular trapezoids made of AstroTurf painted in deep green with maroon trapezoids or rectangles stitched in with yarn, in addition to some red and yellow lines and a red shape that resembles a gem.

Movements of The Land, 2024, hay bale rope, willow, acrylic, yarn on AstroTurf 85" x 68". Photo by Ruben Diaz, courtesy of the artist and Broadway, New York, NY.