The 2026 Barnet Scholars Lecture: Teresa Baker in Conversation

Join artist Teresa Baker in conversation with Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Museum of Art (PMA). Through a mixed media practice that combines both artificial and natural materials, Baker creates abstracted landscapes that explore various topographies— and how we move, see, and explore within them. The materials, texture, shapes, and color relationships are guided by Baker’s heritage as an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations), while also invoking the forms of Euro-American modernist painting. Her practice is exemplified in Looking Up (2022), currently on view at the PMA and in which AstroTurf is repurposed into undulating forms that echo the land itself. 

Baker was named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the Guggenheim Foundation’s 100th class; and is currently a visiting artist at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation. Baker was a Tournesol Artist-in-Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as an artist residence at FOGO Island Arts in Newfoundland, and MacDowell in New Hampshire. Baker’s work has been recently acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Portland Museum of Art. Baker received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA from Fordham University. 

The Barnet Scholars Lecture at the Portland Museum of Art invites an established scholar to lead conversations with museum colleagues on topics related to 20th-century American art. 

This program is generously funded by the Will Barnet Foundation.