ELAINE MCKENZIE MEMORIAL LECTURE

The Elaine McKenzie Memorial Lecture is an annual Museum event which honors Elaine McKenzie who was a founding staff member of the Museum, and, in the words of the Director Emerita, Laurel Reuter,” . . . one of the world’s loveliest women, a person with an educated heart.” Elaine Lau McKenzie was from Hawaii, where she received a degree in literature from the University of Hawaii. Family and friends have established an Elaine McKenzie Memorial Endowment within the North Dakota Museum of Art Foundation, to fund the Lecture series. Past lectures include Marly Kaul of Bemidji, MN, notable Native American artist, Edgar Heap of Birds of Oklahoma, Betty Monkman, former White House curator, and Tim Duffy, director of the Music Maker Relief Foundation.

2025 Lecture Presented by

Artist and Guggenheim Fellow, Teresa Baker

Wednesday, September 10, 5:30 – 7 pm

The Museum’s Annual Elaine McKenzie Memorial Lecture featured nationally recognized Native American artist, Teresa Baker. Born in North Dakota, Baker, now living in Los Angeles, is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes in western North Dakota. Through a mixed media practice combining artificial and natural materials, Baker creates work that explores place, identity and land guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture. The Lecture is free and open to the public. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served. Parking is free.

During her lecture titled, Pulling up the Prairie, Baker discussed her process and practice while exploring the concept of space and place through abstract shapes and textures that evoke the prairie landscape. The title is a play on Ofelia Zepeda’s poem, Pulling down the Clouds, and the larger idea of trying to grasp something so vast, so ephemeral and make it tangible.
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Pulling down the Clouds | Poem by Ofelia Zepeda

Ñ-ku’ibadkaj ‘ant ‘an ols g cewagi.
With my harvesting stick I will hook the clouds.
‘Ant o’i-waññ’io k o ‘i-hudiñ g cewagi.
With my harvesting stick I will pull down the clouds.
Ñ-ku’ibadkaj ‘ant o ‘i-siho g cewagi.
With my harvesting stick I will stir the clouds.

With dreams of distant noise disturbing his sleep,
the smell of dirt, wet, for the first time in what seems like months.
The change in the molecules is sudden,
they enter the nasal cavity.

He contemplates that smell.
What is that smell?
It is rain.

Rain somewhere out in the desert.
Comforted in this knowledge he turns over
and continues his sleep.
dreams of women with harvesting sticks
raised towards the sky.

In memory of Barbara Lannan
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Baker is one of nine artists featured in the Museum’s current exhibition, Moving Tradition into the Future. The exhibition asked artists to examine what it means to be a Native artist living in contemporary times, what beliefs they want to pass along, and how visual language remains alive today. Each of the newly commissioned artworks became part of the Museum’s permanent collection. When asked about her artwork for the exhibition Baker replied, “As I thought about the type of work that would enter the permanent collection in North Dakota, I thought a lot about how I wanted it to feel, what kind of attributes it emoted. One thing I continued to land on was that I wanted it to feel strong. I wanted to represent the strength and beauty of my tribes through this abstraction.  I had an initial vision of cascading loops come down a center line of a rectangular shape. Not dissimilar to a breastplate worn by the Mandan/Hidatsa in battle. From that initial vision, I worked back and forth responding to shapes and colors and how the piece started becoming its own. An embodiment of land and peoples.”