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.