Ongoing

Los Angeles County Hall of Records
320 W Temple St
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa) creates sculptural paintings suggestive of maps or landscapes by utilizing natural and industrial materials, such as sinew, bark, AstroTurf, and acrylic paint. Wenot means the LA River in the Kizh language. Her artwork for the LA County Department of Regional Planning loosely resembles a map of the county. Baker highlights natural features—the LA River, San Gabriel Mountains, and the Pacific Ocean—and blends them with materials, colors, and forms that reflect the First Peoples of this region, whose descendants are still here and who protect and preserve these lands and waters.

Under the guidance of ethnobotanist Matt Teutimez (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians – Kizh Nation), Baker incorporated plants traditionally used for food and medicine by local Indigenous Peoples, including acorns, mulefat, elderberry, and willow twigs from the San Joaquin Marsh. She wove them into AstroTurf to create a composition that embodies the First Peoples without directly depicting them. The artist prompts viewers to contemplate how identities and histories can be represented directly and indirectly.

About the Artist

Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa, b. 1985) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Teresa Baker creates abstracted landscapes that explore vast space, and how we move, see, and explore within them. The materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships are guided by Baker’s Mandan/Hidatsa culture to explore how identity can relate to innate objects.

She has had recent solo exhibitions at Broadway Gallery, NY; The Arts Club of Chicago, IL; de boer, Los Angeles, CA; The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY; and Pied-à-terre, San Francisco, CA. Recent group exhibitions include Prospect. 6 Triennial, New Orleans, LA,; The Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Nerman Museum, Overland Park, KS; and Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and was an artist-in-residence at Fogo Island Arts in Newfoundland in 2022. She was the 2020 Native American fellow at the Ucross Foundation in Ucross, WY, and was a Tournesol Award artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. Baker received a BA from Fordham University in 2008 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2013.

About the Exhibition

LAND is thrilled to present its first permanent public commission. Artworks by Teresa Baker and Felix Quintana were developed for the Los Angeles Department of Regional Planning (LADRP) for their offices at the Hall of Records in Downtown Los Angeles. Together with the LA County Department of Arts and Culture’s Civic Art Division, LAND worked with these artists to develop pieces that were responsive to the mission of LADRP and considers both the people and land that the organization represents and stewards. LADRP offices are open to the public and Baker and Quintana’s artworks are on view.