An enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in the Great Plains, Baker was born in North Dakota, which instilled in her a profound connection to the land. Inviting us to consider how we make sense of the world both around and inside of us, the exhibition draws on Baker’s Mandan and Hidatsa heritage to invigorate and reconstruct Eurocentric histories of landscape painting, craft, and abstraction. Central to the exhibition are Baker’s multi-media paintings. At first glance, these works appear to be formal abstractions, yet their materials and yarn-drawn lines reveal them to be recordings, notations, and psychogeographic mappings of place, time, and personal memories, as further alluded to in artwork titles such as Mapping the Territory (2024) and Field Notes (2022). Across their surfaces, the expanses of the Great Plains and childhood memories of playing in its prairies conflate with the sun-baked topographies of California, and the colorful metropolis of the LA cityscape. Imbued with a deep sense of longing, experimentation, and play, Baker’s works are landscapes of memory.

Spliced, stitched, sprayed, cut, and glued, her landscapes are at once a painting, a sculpture, and a textile. A characteristic of Baker’s work is the coupling of synthetic AstroTurf with culturally and personally relevant natural materials such as yarn, buckskin, parfleche, cornhusks, and willow branches. The brightly colored artificial AstroTurf is perhaps an unexpected proxy for the sprawling grasslands of the Northern Plains, yet Baker intentionally uses this material to speak to notions of adaptability and continuance. In this way, the AstroTurf is a metaphor for what scholar Gerald Vizenor terms “survivance,” or the presence of Native American cultures amidst historical and ongoing acts of violence and assimilation. Importantly featured in the exhibition is a selection of Baker’s drawings on ledger paper, with abstract shapes rendered in brightly colored pastels atop the artist’s writings, which vary in content from a to do list, to a reminder, to a proverb. The intimacy of their scale and Baker’s own scribbles offer a deeper invitation into the artist’s interior world.

Organized by Dean Daderko, Ferring Foundation Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ICA LA’s presentation will be conceived in dialogue with Senior Curator Amanda Sroka, who will work closely with Daderko and Baker on reimagining the exhibition for the ICA LA context. Somewhere Between Earth and Sky at ICA LA will serve as Baker’s most significant presentation on the west coast, enabling her practice to be celebrated and contextualized in the very city in which many of the works were made.