Iowa Artist of the Month: Suzanna de Baca
Meet Suzanna de Baca
For our September Iowa Artist of the Month, we're highlighting Suzanna de Baca, an artist whose work explores the landscapes, histories, and stories that shape the way we see the world around us,.
Based in Huxley, Iowa, de Baca works at the intersection of creativity, leadership, and strategy. She is a visual artist, writer, poet, business advisor, and educator bringing a unique range of experiences to her creative practice. A graduate of Iowa State University's Art and Design program, she returned to visual art after building a career across business, media, and nonprofit leadership.
Suzanna's creative practice is only one of a career centered story around storytelling, ideas, and leadership. She is the founder and CEO of Story Board Advisors, the former CEO of Business Publications Corp, and an Associate Professor of Practice at Iowa State University.
Across these roles—and across her visual art and writing— there is a common theme: curiosity about the stories that shape people, places, and the ways we understand them.
Her latest collection brings that curiosity home to Iowa, inviting us to look at the prairie not simply as scenery, but as something alive with history, transformation, and meaning.
Finding Meaning in the Iowa Landscape
The prairie is at the heart de Baca's latest work. Rather than simply depicting the landscape, she looks deeper, exploring the Iowa prairie as both a physical environment and a place layered with history, memory and meaning.
Working across pastel, acrylic, and sculpture, de Baca approaches the landscape from several perspectives. Her pastel chalk drawings emphasize expansive skies, open prairie, and distant horizons, capturing a sense of space familiar to all Iowans.
Her acrylic paintings on canvas and woof panel move closer to the earth. Built through layers of color and texture, their surfaces evoke soil, weather, time, and the constant transformation of the natural world.
Sculptural works introduce another dimension to the collection., Constructed from PVC pipe on wooden platforms, their linear forms suggest movement and connection, as well as the unseen structures and forces that shape the landscapes around us.
The Stories Beneath the Surface
Layering in central to de Baca's work—not only as an artistic technique, but as a metaphor.
Throughout the collection, recurring symbols and references to ancient petroglyphs point toward the people and stories that existed long before us. These marks encourage us to consider what a landscape can hold: generations of history, personal and collective memories, change, and traces of those who came before.
Beneath one landscape is another story. Beneath one layer is another history. And with each new perspective comes another way of seeing a place we may think we already know.
It's an especially fitting idea for work rooted in the Iowa prairie. A landscape that can appear quiet and simple at first glance becomes something much richer when we stop to consider everything held within it.
We're so excited to celebrate Suzanna de Baca as our Iowa Artist of the Month and share work that offers a new way of looking at the landscape that so many of us call home.
