Wenot (Life Giver)

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 Los Angeles 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.

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.

This project has been commissioned by the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture for the Department of Regional Planning, and was managed by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND).