Teresa Dunn’s ‘larger-than-life’ artwork tells stories of identity

I heard a recent podcast interview with you and learned that you were originally a math major. Was that at IU or somewhere else?
Teresa Dunn: I did my undergraduate degree at Missouri State in Springfield, Mo.

And then you said you “let the wind blow you where it would” and you ended up in art. What was that transition like? At what point did you move to Bloomington?
TD: So, I was in Missouri for my undergrad, and it was about two years into my degree before I realized that that math was not where I needed to be. And, so, my parents advised me just to take classes that I thought would be interesting, and I had always been a “maker” since I was little—drawing, painting, and making things. I took an art class, and it fit.

When I finished my BFA, I applied to a couple of different graduate schools. And I applied to Indiana because they had a very strong reputation in painting and, particularly at the time, in figurative painting which is what I do. And, so, I was really grateful to get in and I moved—I think it was 2000 when I found myself in Bloomington.

So was there anything special or noteworthy about your time at IU that would influence your later work?
TD: Yes. So, my main mentor, [Professor Emeritus] Barry Gealt, took a group of graduate students and undergrads to Italy every summer. We were based in Florence, Italy, and that was a really pivotal time in my degree program. It opened my eyes in a lot of different ways. Primarily, there was the artwork that Barry took us to see, but also experiencing the Italian culture and language and people. I have developed a connection with many friends that I have in Italy and learned the language. That has [had] a really significant impact on both the kind of things that I am interested in exploring visually in my paintings, in terms of composition and the color and the scale of the paintings being quite large. That, I would say, is the most significant lasting impact—that experience with Barry and the other students that I was on the program with.

As I understand it, the people in your paintings are real people, and you have referred to your works as “visually poetic versions of stories that others have told to you.” Can you describe your creative process for bringing other people’s stories to life on canvas in the ways that you do?
TD: Sure. So, the work that you’re talking about—those are some of the most recent paintings, and there are two bodies of work. One is entitled Us and the other is Long Lines of Women. Prior to that, I actually wasn’t painting stories of real people. There wasn’t this kind of poetic, biographical storytelling. They were more invented and not always real.

But I was interested in the absurd and things like that. Over the last several years, I’ve become much more intentional about the kinds of stories that I want to tell. I’m a Mexican American. My mom’s Mexican. My dad’s American. As a racially ambiguous woman who’s experienced a lot of challenges because of my identity—and the kind of clarity that I was growing into as a middle-aged woman reflecting on my life—that led me to value not only my own story and trying to express that as a valid American story, but those of other black and brown people, immigrants, people with multicultural backgrounds. Those stories aren’t as present in the larger cultural narratives and oftentimes are not depicted in positive ways.

And, so, it became really important to me to tell these stories. And I didn’t just want the work to be about myself, but about larger communities, because I felt pretty disconnected as someone who didn’t really fit in fully as an American or fully as a Mexican, being somewhere in between. So, when I began the series Us, I just sent out a social media request to friends, family, colleagues, students, former students, and asked if people would want to participate in this project where I would paint their portrait or their story. And it began really with conversations. And I see this as, really, a collaboration that I couldn’t do without the generosity of people sharing their stories with me. And, so, these collaborations began.

Sometimes I already know a lot about the individual, because, if they are a friend or family member or I’ve had this person as a student for several years, then we already know a lot about each other. But I wanted the stories that I was painting to be also intentional, and, so, we would have an hour or two [of] conversation about the kind of things that they wanted to share. And then, also, thinking about that kind of gap between the American reality and the American dream was one of the prompts that I used.

And I would take photographs myself, if the person I was working with was local. Or, if they were farther away—I began really painting these paintings in the COVID shutdown so I couldn’t travel. People that I was working with who weren’t local to me, I would ask them to send me pictures, and sometimes kind of directing them a little bit about what I was looking for based on our conversation and other times letting them self-direct and send me pictures.

So, my work is not kind of a photographic, journalistic narrative, but [it is] more poetically constructed. I think about color, light, pattern, collisions of time and space and really opening up, because people sometimes would tell stories [for which] the time duration was across many years or sometimes it would be a singular kind of event.

Thinking about how to allow a story to unfold on a canvas that happened over the course of time really asks of me a lot of invention and creativity with how I construct that space, so I can bring my viewers along for the storytelling journey as they look at the artwork later.

These pieces—I’m looking through them as you’re talking here—they’re oil on linen, and they’re really large. How did you decide to work so large?
TD: So, it’s a multi-part answer. One, I just enjoy working really large. I feel like the way my hand operates, I couldn’t do a tight, tiny painting. I just don’t have that kind of affinity. But I really enjoy painting large. But the other part of it is that the stories that I’m painting are so vast and epic at times that I need that space to be able to give the story justice. And I also want the figures to be at or close to—or sometimes even larger than—life size. So, the scale of the figures in the paintings—when you’re at one that’s a six-foot-tall painting, the figures are either at or larger than life size. I feel like that helps the viewers identify with the figures. It feels like a space you can step into or that the figures could step out of into your space. I think it’s something that helps connect the viewer and the audience with what’s happening in the picture plane.

Switching gears a little bit, your body of work called Maintaining the Illusion is a little older. I know you had said that you were doing a lot of self-portraits for a while. I’m looking at your painting titled Texas Transplant right now and wondering if I’m looking at you looking at me. Am I?
TD: Yes, you are! That’s very observant. I taught briefly in Texas for two years—in Nacogdoches—and it was a relatively small town. And, while I loved my department and my colleagues, I did feel some challenges moving into Texas. It felt like a very tight-knit community, and I had a hard time integrating myself into the community. So, the painting is—even though it’s several people around a table and a variety of other absurd things with animals happening—it is a self-portrait. I am in the middle—kind of awkward, mirroring the same gesture as the goose that’s coming in for a landing at the table. That goose’s wings and my arms are doing the same thing, which feels uncomfortable, and, so, it was a reflection of the people and the place and my sense of disconnect from it at the time.

Actually, I just gave a presentation the other day, talking about identity and belonging and I began with this painting, because I think it was one of the first ones where I really began to think about my identity, not just as a depiction of self, but as a product of time, place, and experience and everything that surrounds that. So, I’m really appreciative of your observation that it does feel like a self-portrait, because it truly—even though it’s a group narrative painting—it is a self-portrait.

It feels as if you’re looking right into me, and it’s powerful. There’s also a kind of “magical thinking” feel to your work with the animals and things mixed in that is very appealing. So, with this specific body of work, then, these are not other people’s stories, per se. Are these older paintings more about being absurdist and just playing with different ideas?
TD: So, yes, and I’m glad you said magical thinking, because, at the time, I was really interested in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s writing and magical realism. Other people describe some of my paintings from that time period as surreal. That loose association with the kind of reality that we experience in the real world—I enjoyed the flexible reality of magical realism.

And, so, the things that I was interested in—and I still am, to a great degree—are relationships between people. Not just how we get along, but the disconnect. And, at the time, I don’t think I could have placed that as a question of identity in my own internal conflict about my race and culture, but they were more ambiguous, more fictional. They were fictional narratives that have some kinds of roots in reality and experience—things that I would see around me, whether it was observations in movies or books or the people that I know.

Actually, the people in the painting Texas Transplant are real people—a former colleague, a friend, and my ex-husband. And the raccoon would visit my back porch every evening, predictably and kind of put his little paws on the window. They do have connections to reality, but not all of the paintings from that time period were trying to tell an actual story or depict a specific event.

One of your works has the incredibly long title, Maintaining the Illusion That They Were Not Accidentally Prevented From Being There. What is the story on that one?
TD: That was a quote from a book I was reading by Slavoj Žižek. It was a sentence that made me stop and wonder. And there’s the double—it’s confusing. “Maintaining an illusion that they were not accidentally”—it’s kind of awkward language and I loved the awkwardness in that in the same way that the woman with the sliced-open watermelon has this awkward position to maintain herself inside the picture plane.

It’s kind of difficult to discern what actually is going on. And I remember some of what I intended to be in there. There’s the eggs and the nest. I’m thinking about lifecycles, cycles of birth and rebirth. The confusion and awkwardness of that quote really appealed to me as an idea. And how could a painting be awkward and confusing in that way?

In some ways the space may not make sense. Like, there’s the woman playing the ukulele in front and the woman slightly behind her, and it almost seems impossible that the woman behind could fit in the space that’s actually allotted to her. So, I enjoyed that kind of tension and contradiction and I still play with those ideas in my current work—of contradiction, of tension, of misalignment.

I only just noticed that there’s a big frog or toad in this one. That frog is in your painting You Get What You Pay For in a big way, too. The donut box? It looks like that lady is holding onto, well, some kind of an amphibian! I’m dying to know what those people are looking at. We’re never going to know, of course. I just really dig it.
TD: I’m so glad. Yes, and she doesn’t really seem to be aware that it’s a frog and not a delicious jelly donut.

No! They probably feel a lot alike, right? So, I guess she’s in for a terrible surprise.
TD: That’s right!

In addition to giving voice to the various cultural disconnects that lots of different groups experience, you mentioned [in the podcast] that you were also trying to balance joy with the complexities that make you who you are. Is that balance of joy and complexity going to continue to be a theme for you?
TD: When I began the Us series of paintings, I anticipated there would be a lot more trauma and depictions of the challenges, and there was that in a lot of the works. But what I found was that there was more resilience and strength and beauty. Pride in people’s identities of diverse backgrounds and also a lot of parallels between many of the people’s stories, despite the differences in where they came from or what their experiences were moving through this world.

And the very last painting in Us is pretty much the first painting in the series Long Lines of Women. It’s the yellow painting that’s 6 feet tall by 20 feet across. When I first realized that most of the people who had participated in my Us series project were women and I wanted to do a painting that included all of them—and then I included my grandmother and mother and my daughter, as well, who weren’t originally part of the project—to celebrate the wonderful connections that women have with each other and how, as friends, family, mentors, heroes, that we can celebrate each other’s successes and also be in solidarity with each other.

So, that became the impetus for continuing that as an idea with the project Long Lines of Women, which is the work that I’m doing now. There’s a lot of intention in finding the beauty, the connections, and the strength and elevating that. Using that sense of resiliency in beauty and connection as a way of—perhaps both personally but also culturally and with my artwork—combatting divisiveness and, hopefully, bringing people together.

The most recent two paintings that are part of the Long Lines of Women project are two of my daughter’s teachers. One is a math teacher, and the other is a science teacher. Both women. Both women of color. Both incredibly wonderful role models—not only for girls who are interested in math and science, but all the children at the school love these two women. Celebrating not just the big heroes, but these wonderful people that, on a local level, are part of what gives me hope. I do see them as hopeful figures as they help educate our children and my daughter, in particular. Those people in our local community—and I know that there are thousands of other wonderful teachers across the country who are excellent role models in the way that these two magnificent women are.

Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would just like to share?
TD: One thing that I hear a lot from viewers, whether it’s from my exhibitions or talks that I give on my work, is that people feel seen by my paintings, and that is extremely important to me. I feel like artwork does have a functional place in society, and it is part of why it is so important for me to make the work that I’m making right now, which I do see continuing into the foreseeable future. It gives meaning and hope or a sense of being seen and being visible and validated. People feel validated by seeing their stories reflected back. My paintings can act like a mirror, and that is really valuable to me.

Learn more information about the artist and her work