Grand Forks, Wednesday, September 10, 5:30 – 7 pm: The Museum’s Annual Elaine McKenzie Memorial Lecture will feature notable Native American artist, Teresa Baker. Born in North Dakota, Baker, now living in Los Angeles, is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in western North Dakota. Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Baker creates work that explores place, identity and land guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture. The Lecture is free and open to the public. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Parking is free.

During her lecture titled, Pulling up the Prairie, Baker will discuss her process and practice while exploring the concept of space and place through abstract shapes and textures that evoke the prairie landscape. The title is a play on Ofelia Zepeda’s poem, Pulling down the Clouds, and the larger idea of trying to grasp something so vast, so ephemeral and make it tangible.

Baker is one of nine artists featured in the Museum’s current exhibition, Moving Tradition into the Future. The exhibition asked artists to examine what it means to be a Native artist living in contemporary times, what beliefs they want to pass along, and how visual language remains alive today. Each of the newly commissioned artworks became part of the Museum’s permanent collection. When asked about her artwork for the exhibition Baker replied, “As I thought about the type of work that would enter the permanent collection in North Dakota, I thought a lot about how I wanted it to feel, what kind of attributes it emoted. One thing I continued to land on was that I wanted it to feel strong. I wanted to represent the strength and beauty of my tribes through this abstraction.  I had an initial vision of cascading loops come down a center line of a rectangular shape. Not dissimilar to a breastplate worn by the Mandan/Hidatsa in battle. From that initial vision, I worked back and forth responding to shapes and colors and how the piece started becoming its own. An embodiment of land and peoples.”

Teresa Baker was born in Watford City, ND and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Baker has had recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco; Interface Gallery, Oakland; and most recently, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, MO. Her Group exhibitions include Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Marin MoCA, Novato, CA, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. She will be included in the upcoming edition of Made in LA: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025.

Baker is celebrated for large-scale abstract paintings on irregularly shaped pieces of artificial turf. To make these works, she brushes and sprays acrylic paint onto this nubbly surface and introduces linear designs with natural and synthetic fiber yarns. Baker also affixes unexpected materials like willow, beads, buffalo and deer hide, tree bark, corn husks, and natural and artificial sinew into her compositions. The surfaces of her paintings dance with tactility and reward close looking. These dynamic and colorful artworks can resemble vast landscapes, inviting viewers to imagine prairie vistas and bird’s-eye views of grasslands, but they are equally resonant as inventive compositions uniting bold colors, drawing, and dynamic geometry.

The Elaine McKenzie Memorial Lecture is an annual Museum event which honors Elaine McKenzie who was a founding staff member of the Museum, and, in the words of the Director Emerita, Laurel Reuter," . . . one of the world's loveliest women, a person with an educated heart." Elaine Lau McKenzie was from Hawaii, where she received a degree in literature from the University of Hawaii. Family and friends have established an Elaine McKenzie Memorial Endowment within the North Dakota Museum of Art Foundation, to fund the Lecture series. Past lectures include Marly Kaul of Bemidji, MN, notable Native American artist, Edgar Heap of Birds of Oklahoma, Betty Monkman, former White House curator, and Tim Duffy, director of the Music Maker Relief Foundation.

The North Dakota Museum of Art is located at 261 Centennial Drive on the campus of the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. Exhibition hours are weekdays, 9 am - 5 pm and weekends, 1 - 5 pm. Admission to the Museum is free of charge, donations welcome. For more information, 701-777-4195 or ndmoa@ndmoa.com. Visit ndmoa.com to discover more about Museum exhibitions, Cafe, programs, concerts, and events, and membership opportunities.

https://ndmoa.com/moving-tradition/