Upcoming Publications...

My work is included in John Seed’s forthcoming book More Disruption: Representation in Flux from Schiffer Publishing expected November 2023

 My artwork and an essay I wrote is included in An Artist and a Mother, edited by Tara Carpenter Estrada, et al., Demeter Press expected in April 2023. Pre-order copies can be purchased here: https://demeterpress.org/books/an-artist-and-a-mother/ the code MOTHERS will apply a 30% discount (please note the price listed there is Cdn $) The project is funded by the Laycock Foundation and the Simmons Research Endowment

Recent Press

Interview by Tyler Thompson. “New Exhibits at the Dennos Museum Explore and Celebrate BIPOC Identity.” Interlochen Public Radio. Publication and Broadcast Date, 1/23/2023. Audio Replay embedded in web-page 4 minutes 36 seconds. https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/ipr-news/2023-01-23/new-exhibits-at-the-dennos-museum-explore-and-celebrate-bipoc-identity   

Baxter, Alli. “Traverse City Museum Showcases Work by BIPOC Artists on MLK Day.” WPBN, 16 Jan. 2023, https://upnorthlive.com/news/local/traverse-city-museum-showcases-work-by-bipoc-artists-on-mlk-day/

Hug, Emma. “Families Honor MLK at Dennos Museum's Embrace the Dream Event.” 9&10 News, 16 Jan. 2023, https://www.9and10news.com/2023/01/16/families-honor-mlk-at-dennos-museums-embrace-the-dream-event/

Art-to-Art Palette Journal "Voices of record for the Arts and Educational communities since 1988.", At the Museums Department. “A Look of Cultural Complexity in America.” Art-to-Art Palette Journal, Art-to-Art Palette Journal, 18 Dec. 2022, https://www.arttoartpalettejournal.com/a-look-of-cultural-complexity-in-america/

Williams, Adele Elise, and JoAnne McFarland. “‘The Road to Rehab Is Paved’: Broadsided Press.” Broadsided Press | Broadsided Press, 27 June 2022, https://broadsidedpress.org/broadsides/the-road-to-rehab-is-paved/

Leclaire, Michele, Gallery Director. Disrupted Realism: In Conversation with John Seed, Anne Harris, Yvette L Cummings, Teresa Dunn, and Craig Cully. YouTube, 23 Apr. 2021,www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OW2tGD5890

Exhibition Essay by Teri Henderson: US at the Dennos Museum

Teresa Dunn’s oil paintings explore her location, her history, her identity, her past, her present, and her future through their embedded symbolism and visual poetry. Her artworks’ power lies in the masterful rendering of her subjects: people who look at you and into you. They translate not only Dunn’s truth and experiences as a Mexican-American woman, but they also mirror the experience of feeling like an outsider. America is so much more than red, white, and blue, it is also black and brown, and green. In Dunn’s oeuvre, artwork exists that illustrates the full embodiment of what it means to be a woman of color living and working in America.

 

In this liminal space, in 2022, we exist between the worlds of before and after, in the wake of a new normal. We live in the possibility of a new world and a new way of thinking, creating, and existing—and art is our anchor. It is the bridge from our past to our present, and the creation of art, especially in times of strife, is a revolutionary practice.

 

In a speech at Vanderbilt University, Toni Morrison spoke about the transformative and revolutionary power of art: “Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last.” When I engage with Dunn's artworks, Morrison’s words immediately come to mind. Both Dunn and Morrison have created art that speaks to the deepest parts of our humanity, forging familiarity and community. Art allows us to know that we are not alone, that we are a part of something divine and expansive and outside of ourselves.

In her self-portrait El Corrido de Teresita Dunn (Del Cielo Cayó Una Rosa), Dunn is depicted braiding her hair. A flurry of multicolored birds, messengers of hope and lightness, surround and adorn her. Butterflies and roses are present in the image as well, representing freedom and transformation. In the top left corner of a mint green background, a wooden clock appears, while the lower part of the background is marked by a wash of mossy green. Dunn wears a red floral dress, a jade green necklace, and gold hoops flanking her thick plaits of dark hair. Her face is resolute and beautiful as she gazes outward, brown eyes soft and deep in thought. Her body is at once apart from and part of the nature that surrounds her. The artwork’s title completes the artist’s reclamation of the Mexican name she grew up with, Teresita, and thus the full embodiment of her culture and intersectionality as a Mexican-American woman.

 

To exist in America as a woman of color creates a kind of double consciousness that never can be shaken. As I write this essay in 2022, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade, as gas prices rise, rent becomes too expensive, and people are still dying daily from COVID-19, we seem to be at the axis of a planet out of orbit. I appreciate paintings like Dunn’s that force me to be still and ground myself in their existence. To create artwork that is so vulnerable and truth-telling is an act of bravery, and it functions as a testament to the liberatory praxis of artmaking.

 

El Corrido de Javier Salas Vera (Alegoría de los Mojados, parte 2) is a beautiful example of the hybridity of Dunn's heritage as it blooms into fruition on her canvases. There’s a large eagle flying above a cactus plant clutching a snake in its claws, a reference to the national flag of Mexico. While a net of white lace flags crosses the painting, three figures smile, and a woman rides her bicycle. A plane is taking off in the left half of the painting, flying out of the frame, while a green sign reads “ni aqui, ni alla.” To the right of the eagle, a young boy wearing a white shirt with fading lines of red, black, and blue, clutches an American flag backward as he gazes out of the frame, away from the viewer. There are six vinyl records suspended throughout the painting, their titles in Spanish, and they float near containers of overturned spices, giant stalks of corn, and a sea of yellow flowers.

 

This painting illustrates the story of Javier Salas Vera, a seventeen-year-old who traveled for three nights crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. This is the only oil painting that Dunn has created that tells the history of someone else as well as her own. She has painted herself into Javier’s narrative—she’s on the bicycle, imagining herself on a parallel journey to understand, reclaim, and relish her Mexican heritage, to understand more of herself and her culture. The image results in an amalgamation of Dunn’s lived experiences, a life connecting family, heritage, and exploration.

Her latest work, A Long Line of Women, is an expansive painting composed of four long square panels that make up a larger horizontal rectangular image twenty feet in length. The painting is rich in scale as well as composition. Within its boundaries Dunn has painted no fewer than sixteen figures, women and children in various hues. The women are outside gazing here and there, near a red pickup truck, near trees, holding a newspaper, literally in a long line. On the walls of the Dennos Museum, these women are larger than life.

Dunn is extremely talented at conveying the emotions of her subjects with a quiet rumbling and feminine power, and A Long Line of Women is another painting that speaks to the artist’s past. The first of the square panels shows two young girls and three older women. One woman looks to her right at a maternal figure holding the hand of a younger girl in a red dress and flip-flops. One girl looks at the viewer, smiling. There is a woman climbing a red ladder looking away from the viewer, and in the background, a woman wearing an outfit that seems to be more dated than the others in the scene. I consider her an ancestor, perhaps someone from Dunn's past, watching her legacy, her lineage, and her descendants live on.

 

With her 2023 solo exhibition at Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City, Michigan, Teresa Dunn has solidified her role as a master painter and creative alchemist. These visionary narrative oil paintings contain tendrils of her history and heritage along with her love and skill for her craft. This retrospective is visual evidence of a symbiotic relationship between Dunn's life and her paintings. Revealing constant movements across time, space, paint, and canvas, the artworks on display connect Dunn to her loved ones and culture. The paintings also are a delight for marginalized folks, those who seek familiarity embedded in artworks and predominantly white spaces like museums. The surreal dreamscapes Dunn renders offer the viewer the chance to see themselves represented in her creations, perhaps even on the walls of an art gallery.

Exhibition Essay by John Seed

Teresa Dunn: Islands

What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations?

– Italo Calvino

 

Looking over artist Teresa Dunn’s recent series of tondo paintings—she calls them “Islands”—tends to bring up contradictory emotions: the images they carry are both comforting and unsettling. Tinged with nostalgia and animated by youthful memories, the series offers a narrative seen through the eyes of a female character who is both a stand-in for the artist and her independent invention. “My protagonist occupies a space that is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere,” Dunn explains. “She exists between multiple and contradictory, realities.” The alternate universe that Dunn’s series generates is a place of polarities and poetry, rich in overlaps between revelation and mystery.

Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Dunn identifies as Mexican-American, having grown up conscious of being suspended between two distinctive cultures. Raised in a small Illinois town, Dunn understood some Spanish—but didn’t learn to speak it until adulthood—and spent a month every other year visiting with Mexican relatives. Although she played the piano and was encouraged to draw and paint, Dunn says it never occurred to her that she might want to be an artist: she entered college in Springfield Missouri as a math major with a scholarship. Two years later, during what she recalls as an “existential and intellectual crisis, Dunn began taking drawing classes and discovered that making art “felt like home.”

Her subsequent studies, including graduate work in art at Indiana University, deepened Dunn’s engagement with both figure drawing and the subject matter of identity and relationships. A trip to Italy—where she fell in love with the culture and made deep friendships in the city of Venice—gave her the sense of another home both literally and culturally. Dunn has been spending as much time as she can in Venice for the past decade, letting the feeling of its water and weather infuse her work while letting the works of her favorite writers—including Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elena Ferrante—expand and infuse her imaginative caprices.  

Painting “a lot of water and boats” during an Italian sojourn led indirectly to the idea of painting a narrative series set on an island: Dunn actually painted her first tondos during a 2017 residency on Cuttyhunk island off the coast of Massachusetts, 12 miles south of New Bedford. The idea for an exhibition titled A woman, an island, the moon came to Dunn early on, providing a sense of focus as she developed still lifes and ideas. Starting each tondo with a randomly colored ground—sometimes bright sometimes neutral—helped Dunn vary moods, suggest weather and generate formal elements and their counterpoints.    

For example, Dunn’s 2017 tondo “Landlocked” has a neutral, fleshy ground tone that is broken up by rough foreground stripes of orange, turquoise, mauve and yellow. The pattern of stripes morphs into wavelike patterns and darkens around a tiny figure standing in her boat, glancing towards the shaded vestiges of a toy-like harbor town. It’s a scenario that wakes up the senses and conjures enigmas. Its symbolic suggestions—of loneliness, internal conflict and difference—are both contained and harmonized by the serenity of the tondo: a Renaissance format used by Raphael and others to provide a sense of wholeness and stability. Dunn has an acute sensitivity towards the conflicting emotions that she portrays and her formal choices of color, tone and pattern resonate with the poetry created by these compositional and thematic forces and counterforces.   

 Travel and transportation—metaphors that appear in many of the key images—are often represented by toy objects that Dunn has borrowed from her six-year old daughter. In “Perfidy” a yellow vintage motorcycle activates the possible dual meanings of arrival and departure in front of a bird who looks out a window towards the moon and a white house set in a stand of pines. The title of the image—which refers to untrustworthiness or deceit—undercuts the viewer’s inclination to take any of the meanings suggested as literal or auto-biographical. “I've long felt that I'm a storyteller and I draw from my self and my observations of the world around me,” Dunn offers, “but my paintings are a kind of combination of fictive futures, imagined alternate realities, and dream-like perversions of past events.”

“Moonlight Tug,” which depicts a tugboat floating into a blue ocean/sky towards a partially painted white moon has a feeling of restlessness about it. It expresses the feeling of yearning that often accompanies childhood dreams: it appears to be set on a child’s quilt littered with dollhouses. The idea of a “tug”—a boat and an emotional pull—is just right for a painting that offers such a striking image of insomniac desire.

It's a fleeting image that feels both tangible and unresolved.

What Dunn does so masterfully with this painting—and in her recent series—is to invite her viewers to share the universal poetry of her paintings without divulging or insisting on any particulars. To do so would dampen their magic, which is nourished and sustained by the interchange between nostalgia and revelation: The poet Isabella Leardini—who Dunn has invited to respond to her work through poetry—understands this perfectly:

How the sense of all things lost

is revealed one day after another

in the stroke of a master who determines

the unexpected perfection that remains

- from Una stagione d’aria (A season of air)

—John Seed is an art historian and independent curator who has written for the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Arts of Asia, and other fine publications

A woman, an island, the moon

Islands are simultaneously protected and isolated by the waters that surround them. These circular paintings are like miniature islands that encompass the life of my invented female protagonist and her small world. The circle, saturated color, and pattern allow me to explore metaphors for isolation and belonging, boundaries and openness, hope and hopelessness, home and homeland. This alternative constructed reality is observed from numerous points of reference including the protagonist, her cohabitants, an omniscient voyeur, and the viewer. My protagonist occupies a space that is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. She exists between multiple and contradictory, realities. Expansive waters separate and connect here from there, yesterday from tomorrow, and a woman and her island from the moon.