Tula Telfair has always been fascinated by “the concept that we as humans have to label everything. Nature doesn’t label itself.” The Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer José Saramago observed, “It seems you don’t understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you’ll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them…”
The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, is hosting the exhibition TULA TELFAIR: NATURE Does Not Locate Itself through October 5. The exhibition features 33 canvases from 2014 to the present, including the monumental 72-by-119-inch Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself.
Fluid Desire, 2025 oil on canvas, 72 x 68 in.
Telfair locates herself on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she is professor of both art and environmental studies. Her studio is a half-hour away in Essex, Connecticut, on the banks of the Connecticut River, where she sometimes has up to 20 canvases underway at the same time. The studio’s glass door is opposite a window offering a view into a birch grove. Designed by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich, the 1,000-square-foot space is for painting imagined landscapes rather than those observed. Rich had been a student of Telfair at Wesleyan, and Peterson had taught architecture there.
Civilization Could Not Do Without It, 2014, oil on canvas, 75 x 100 in.
The personal relationship in the design of her studio reflects Telfair’s personal response to the landscapes she experienced growing up in Africa, Asia and Europe. She returned to the United States with her scientist parents when she was 8. The experience inspired an inner reverence for nature. She paints large, photorealistic landscapes inspired by dreams and the visual memories and visceral feelings from her childhood, but invented as places she may have visited or may yet visit. The detail in her paintings causes the viewer to enter the artist’s imagination and to believe in the scenes. She doesn’t include figures in her landscapes to encourage that freedom of experience on the part of viewers to enter her space of past, present and future, and to experience from their own perspective.
Tula Telfair in her Lyme, Connecticut, studio, designed by Patterson Rich Office, Brooklyn, NY.
“As I paint,” she explains, “I try to remember the physical and emotional impact of a place. So instead of locating it, I relocate myself using memory and imagination…I am fascinated by the subjectivity of perception and the power of memory to anchor our place in the world.”
The Limits Are Flexible, 2023 oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
At the Morris Museum, Telfair has complemented the non-specificity of her paintings with selections from the museum’s collection of minerals and global material culture. At the beginning of the exhibition, there is an installation of sand specimens collected by Grace Borden between 1985 and approximately 2012. Telfair explains, “I placed these samples of earth from locations all over our planet, accompanied by a map pinning those locations at the entrance of this exhibition, in order to set the stage for how to view and understand my work. My landscapes aren’t real places necessarily. It’s wonderful to have the physical reality in the front.
The Temptations, 2025, oil on canvas, 78 x 70 in.
“In these paintings,” she continues, “I wanted to make art that is evocative, that provides an emotional journey for the viewer. They’re not about the landscape, necessarily, but about how it can make you feel. No one has to know what I’m feeling. People will have their own experience. From a distance they’re realistic but closer you can see that they’re all done technically differently. I love what they can be seen as. In the end they’re paintings and a reflection of being a human being.”
She adds, “I guess I would say that I don’t want my paintings to be scary. I want them to be awesome. I don’t want them to be pretty. I want them to be beautiful.”
The Vessel Was Nothing, 2025, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in.
All artworks © Tula Telfair. Images courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York, and the artist.
In a talk when the paintings were shown at Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, she summed up her experience of the landscape. “I grew up in the wilderness where there was no electricity and there was no running water. There were no telephones and there was no road. It was just like thousands of miles of nothing except nature…I love wilderness, and I think capturing and preserving a sense of that place where other people don’t exist gives you this poetic, grand experience of the earth. It’s exciting for me.” —
TULA TELFAIR: NATURE Does Not Locate Itself
Through October 5, 2025
Morris Museum
6 Normandy Heights Road
Morristown, NJ 07960
(973) 971-3700, www.morrismuseum.org
Powered by Froala Editor
