The Brooklyn Rail

In many ancient belief systems, earth, air (or wind), fire, and water hold special significance as the vital, interconnected elements of our universe that sustain all life. In her current single-gallery exhibition at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Teresa Baker presents seven recent works on AstroTurf that draw from these elements in order to pose ambitious questions about how we make sense of the land around us and what painting’s role in this process might be.

Two major pieces that hang suspended from the center of the gallery—Baker’s first double-sided paintings, and the most recent works on view—put fire and water front and center. Everything I Carry with Me (2025) hangs near the center of the gallery; one of its two ember-red sides is marked off by a cascade of equidistant peaked lines in blue acrylic yarn, while the other contains the cryptic symbolism of clustered rectangles, mounds, a circle, and a square. The exhibition publication tells us that, miraculously, Everything I Carry with Me survived the Eaton fire this January, lashed to a frame outside Baker’s Altadena home as the artist and her family evacuated. The other suspended painting, Throw It to the Ocean (2025), features an incomplete circle bisected by a vertical ladder on one side, and on the other a swooping line that holds a constellation of multicolor scribbles in yarn, like marks scratched quickly onto the surface. Taken together, Throw It to the Ocean’s title and electric blue ground imply water. Earth is suggested in every work through Baker’s allusions to landscape, and air is the space between paintings—the space we traverse, and thus of subjective response. Already, the show aims at systems of thought, those gossamer threads of comprehension that bind together disparate aspects of everyday experience. It asks us, perhaps, to consider how those conceptual matrices might differ across culture or circumstance.

Baker has risen to national prominence recently, with gallery representation in New York, Los Angeles, and Antwerp, an acquisition by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a Guggenheim “genius” fellowship earlier this year. Several facts of biography have become familiar through the press accompanying these achievements: that the artist grew up in the Northern Plains, that she is of Mandan and Hidatsa descent and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and that her father worked as a National Park Service ranger and the superintendent at Little Bighorn Battlefield and later Mount Rushmore. So have several facts of facture: the irregular shapes of Baker’s compositions recall the contours of natural materials like leather hides, and the AstroTurf’s artifice speaks to colonialists’ disingenuous narratives about their claims to the Great Plains. These facts could help substantiate an interpretation of Baker’s paintings, but they do not in themselves constitute one. With work that has grown in scale and ambition, presented now at a non-commercial venue, this exhibition marks both an auspicious moment in Baker’s career and an opportunity for us to think more deeply about her practice.

What struck me most forcefully upon entering the show was the ability of Baker’s paintings to offer multiple inroads at once. While Baker has said they convey sense memories of places she knows well, each work also invites the viewer to partake of this mental exercise. They encourage us to think about the land and our relationship to it on multiple registers: What landscapes do I know? How do I relate to them, mentally and bodily? What inherited or chosen worldviews inform these conceptions? This is present in Baker’s paintings, for example, in her contours, which are never geometric and do not “close off” space. The central blue expanse of acrylic paint in Flow (2023) is applied unevenly and fades irregularly into its brown AstroTurf ground, like a puddle soaking into the earth. Likewise, the central compositional “X” (because it has only three of the four appendages we find in a true “X”) renounces expectations of immediate legibility. Expanse (2023) includes a similar symbol, and here it is wholly permeable, delineated by widely-spaced willow pieces. Some lines both arrest themselves, like the cypress seed–studded stretch of yarn in Throw It to the Ocean that meets another line at the top of the composition, and traverse other sweeps of yarn, suggesting a logic layering and coexistence rather than clear-cut borders, boundaries, and delineations. As Laura Marris wrote in the exhibition publication, quoting Etel Adnan, the paintings refer “our memory back to the world at large.”

Placed back into the realm of everyday experience: think about the roads near where you grew up. Chances are you never saw them from above, yet can reconstruct a mental picture of their contours, as well as a topographic map informed by where puddles formed in the grass, or how water flowed down the block. It is possible to hold both these visions in your mind at once, just as any land mass that Baker’s works allude to is not of defined scale or orientation. Each artwork holds the capacity for these and many more perspectives—I mean this both literally (as seen from above, seen from the side, or held and turned around in the mind) and figuratively (as personal memories supplied by the individual viewer).

This hermeneutic openness is one reason that the new double-sided, suspended paintings are so compelling. They emphasize more than ever before the interpretative potential Baker’s work has always offered—holding in mind two or more images of the land at once—and now deploy and dramatize this capacity within a single artwork. To stand before one side of Everything I Carry with Me is to recall, incompletely, what the other side contains. Yet having seen the first side, we carry its memory with us to the other as part of our lived experience. This fungible and imperfect experience, like Baker’s work generally, prompts us to consider how and through which systems we think about and act upon the land. It helps us to be self-aware in this process.