Teresa Dunn is a Mexican American artist raised in rural southern Illinois. Her identity life and art are influenced by her racial and cultural heritages and the complexities of being a brown woman in the Midwest. She’s a Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design in the College of Arts & Letters.
Dunn wrote the following article, originally published by MSU Today, about her experiences growing up in the Midwest, as an artist and teacher, and in creating a painting, titled “Together,” to commemorate the inaugural Spartan Bus Tour.
I came to MSU in 2006. I was really excited about teaching at an R1 university. The idea of making and exhibiting my creative work as my research was really appealing and a revelation. I quickly accepted the job and have loved being a faculty member at MSU. I have been generously supported by my colleagues, department, college, and the university. I am grateful every day for being a part of the MSU community and what it has enabled me to accomplish in my life as an artist and educator.
Teaching is a really special experience for me because I accompany students in the early part of their life journey and help guide them to the creative professional and person they are becoming. That process can be fraught, and my role is to provide them with the appropriate technical abilities and critical visual thinking skills to accomplish their artistic goals. My beliefs about being an artist and an educator is to address each person in my class as a unique individual with their own agency, diverse background, goals, learning approaches. One-on-one dialog is a large part of mentorship. Knowing who my students are as people is vital. It is a privilege to be an educator who is also an artist.
What is reflected in my art has been influenced by who I am and what I’ve experienced. As a child and young adult, people would often ask, “Where are you from?” or “What are you?” Innocently, I would respond, “I’m from Illinois” or “I grew up in the Midwest” but that wasn’t the question people were really asking; it was coded language to say, “Where are your ancestors from?” or “You don’t look like you belong here.” It took me until well into my adulthood to understand the subtext and the implications on my sense of belonging in relationship to what I looked like. And what I looked like was a racially ambiguous brown person in predominantly white communities.
While I had many wonderful experiences growing up in my small largely white town in southern Illinois, I had persistent challenges growing up as the brown daughter of my Mexican mom and American dad when my two brothers were ostensibly white, my parents white in skin color, and my community mirror was through a white lens. The problem was that the world didn’t see me through the same lens. Not only did my appearance suggest origins outside of my community, but my name also growing up was “Teresita.” It is still painful to remember how my name was mispronounced — not usually out of malice, but sometimes it was. Regardless, it was a constant reminder that I was different than my peers and the community I was raised in. I abandoned my Mexican name as soon as I left for college. I thought I could escape the persistent questioning from people I would meet about my racial origins and cultural heritage. But it wasn’t just my name. I saw myself as white, but I didn’t realize that I was brown. It wasn’t until I was deep into my adulthood that I really confronted my own identity and the conflict deep in my core that has manifested as racial impostor syndrome. I wasn’t really sure of who I was or if I could even see myself objectively, or if it even mattered. What color am I? Did I belong in this community that I was born into? What did it mean to be Mexican American? I’m not entirely American, not entirely Mexican. And it created this gap in my sense of who I am.
What has never been in question though was being an artist. I’ve always been a maker. My mom has a binder full of all the drawings and paintings I did since I could pick up a pencil. It’s really special to look back and notice that even at a very young age I was drawing pictures of people or animals in peculiar situations. It seems that I have always been a visual storyteller and had an interest in the absurd. And while I didn’t make a conscious choice to become a professional artist or professor, my path has led naturally in that direction. Both are a calling, and I followed willingly.
While being an artist, a painter, was a natural evolution, it took me a very long time to find my way to what I really was passionate about making my work. About 2015, I began the tough confrontation with myself and with my own sense of identity. It began with hearing distressing news stories about school children in Michigan chanting “Build that Wall” around their young Latino peers. This broke something inside me, or maybe it allowed me to stop stifling the cultural and racial trauma I experienced my whole life. This compelled me to take a hard look not only at myself and other marginalized people with parallel life experiences. As the daughter of an immigrant, as a brown woman, as a person with dual cultures, and living both the joys and complexities that accompany that as part of who I am, I could see my artistic and personal mission laid out before me with a kind of clarity I had never experienced.
The most important thing about my work, especially my current work, is that it amplifies the voices of diverse and marginalized people, Black and Brown, immigrants, people with multicultural backgrounds, and women. My work shares the stories that real people who participate in my projects want to share about themselves in ways that validate the kinds of complexity that arise and exist in this country. My paintings provide representation of a range of American narratives and I’m proud to serve as a conduit in sharing these important stories.
Last fall, I had the opportunity to be part of the inaugural Spartan Bus Tour, and that experience has led me to my most recent painting, commissioned by MSU’s Office of the President in response to this amazing trip.
At the time the university was in the planning stages, I happened to have a painting featured at the Muskegon Museum of Art, one of the scheduled stops on the tour. MSU invited me as a guest on the stop and to share a few words at the reception about my artwork and award-winning painting. I, of course, agreed as it is important to me to share my work and continue to amplify the voices of others. In the process, the organizers reached out asking if I would be interested in making a commemorative painting of the bus tour itself. I learned that President Guskiewicz, in his previous position, had done something similar at UNC Chapel Hill. I was very impressed that President Guskiewicz thought to include the arts as an integral part of this process.
Celebrating the many things that we do as a university, not just more frequently visible fields, was more than a gesture. It was an embrace and acknowledgement of the power of the arts and its vital importance in society. The arts have the capacity to elevate ideas, identify issues, and advocate for change in addition to being aesthetically pleasing. To make a painting to exemplify what the Spartan Bus Tour represents was a special opportunity that aligns with my creative practice but also shows the relevance of the arts through my painting.
It is a tremendous honor to be part of the tour, to take in the participants’ experiences, and synthesize and then communicate the depth and the meaning of the Spartan Bus Tour. I was really fortunate to be able to share time with people on the trip and witness the power of meaningful scholarship, community engagement, and the importance of our collective experiences. I was inspired by the conversations I had with the participants on the stops I was able to attend. I combined that with my photos and the images provided from MSU’s incredible photographers and videographers to create a visually poetic response to the event.
The Spartan Bus Tour is a testimony to the rich ways that MSU’s mission has a positive impact throughout the state of Michigan. As if each element of the tour were a thread in a tapestry, spun from spools generated by research, creative activity, natural resources, and most importantly our vibrant communities and those we serve, I wove them throughout my painting. The threads are rich with color, flush with meaning, and bound by togetherness.
Article originally published by MSU Today
