Wenot (Life Giver)

Artist: Baker, Teresa b. 1985

Date: 2024

Medium: AstroTurf, yam, acrylic paint, plastic beads, buckskin, acorns, mulefat, elderberry, lemonadeberry, and willow

Artwork Dimensions: 57 1/4 x 195 3/4 x 1 1/2 in.

County Department: Regional Planning

Artwork Site: Hall of Records

Supervisorial District: 1

Current Status: On view

About the Artwork: 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 (Gabrieleno 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, to reconsider how they care for this land, and to learn more about its original inhabitants.

About the Artist: Teresa Baker (b. 1985, Watford City, North Dakota) is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in western North Dakota. She received a BA from Fordham University in 2008 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2013. She has had solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles (2021); Interface Gallery, Oakland (2019); Gray Contemporary, Houston (2018); and Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont (2016), among other sites. Baker has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay Area at venues such as Kiria Koula (2015); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2014); di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (2014); Luggage Store Gallery (2014); and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (2012). Baker has been an artist-in-residence at Fogo Island Arts (2022), MacDowell (2015), and Headlands Center for the Arts (2014-15). She is the recipient of the 2020 Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation.