Tula Telfair

Tula Telfair (American, b. 1961) is best known for her monumental landscape paintings. Telfair was born in Bronxville, New York, but spent her childhood in Europe, Africa, and East Asia, before returning and settling in the United States. She received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in 1984 as a W.W. Smith Foundation Fellow, and she received her MFA from Syracuse University in 1986 as a graduate fellow. Telfair has taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut since 1989, where she served as Academic Dean of the Arts and Humanities and received the Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She is currently the Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Wesleyan. 

Telfair’s work seeks to continually evolve the landscape painting, honoring its origins in the Renaissance and its heyday in the 19th century, but pushing the genre to new heights in the contemporary art world. Taking inspiration from her childhood on four continents, Telfair’s landscapes are woven from memory and narrative. Her work suggests a simultaneous presence of past, present, and future in the landscapes she depicts, capturing the narrative of nature itself.

Telfair has been represented by Forum Gallery in New York and Los Angeles since 2004. Her work is present in many public collections and has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. Telfair lives and works in New York City and Lyme, Connecticut.

Available Works