About

Los Angeles-based Mandan/Hidatsa artist Teresa Baker features seven large-scale hanging works in Capturing Space. Baker’s bold color fields and expanded-scale works evoke the style of mid-century New York Expressionist artists, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko. Combining Native American craft traditions using buffalo hide, willow, and other natural materials with artificial materials like AstroTurf and synthetic yarns, Baker says the exhibition contains new works made in response to the landscape of northeastern Wyoming on the high plains—beneath the Bighorn Mountains—and inspired by the vastness of that area, the unique geological formations of giant rocks (and the flora fossils imprinted on them), petrified logs, and the sky. “Essentially, I was inspired by the freedom of that land at Ucross, Wyoming, and wanted that freedom to enter my choices in my work,” Baker says. “I wanted to embody and capture that space in my work.” Baker is the newest recipient of the Ucross Foundation’s Fellowship for Native American Visual Artists and holds a master of fine arts from California College for the Arts in San Francisco.

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art with Natasha Boas, Ph.D., curator-at-large.