[7] Tewes paints everyday people and domestic interiors in a precise, almost deadpan style that Artforum critic Ronny Cohen called "searingly direct" in its presentation of information and emotional impact.

After working and traveling, she attended Hunter College in New York City (BFA, 1978), where her key influences were narrative, representational artists such as Frida Kahlo and Edward Hopper, as well as the Surrealists.

In her early work, Tewes portrayed candid, accessible narrative moments, using snapshots of family and friends to represent the lives of people that critics observed, "rarely appear in fine art.

"[17] Artforum's Ronny H. Cohen attempted to dub work like Tewes's—which sought to communicate in an immediate, accessible fashion to a wider audience—"energism," a label that never caught on with critics, who felt it was too elastic a concept.

[16][22] They investigated social relationships in commonplace family or leisure situations, as in Moose Club Gambling (1978) or The Livingroom Couch (1982), which depicts a middle-class couple slumped on a sofa in their no-frills home; the woman stares out ambiguously, perhaps as one critic noted, leaving the final word on their lives to a half-empty/half-full glass at the edge of the picture's foreground.

[2] Ronny Cohen called Tewes's style illustrative, precise and realist,[23] but others like Brian Breger observed that she avoided "the frigid exactness of the super-realists"[16] by capturing the warmth, humor and emotional depths of her subjects.

Critics speculated that the ambiguous scribbles might represent plaintive, rueful traces of recent exchanges, thought projections, or conversations to come, intimating marital discord, sexual tension, irreconcilable disputes, and lonely childhoods.

"[31] Inanimate Conversations (2002) portrays a one-eyed teddy bear and a doll, intruded upon by intense graffiti implying an absent child subject to such discussions;[10] in I'm Not Home Please Leave a Message (1999), a boy lies on an adult bed next to an answering machine, surrounded by the searing, scrawled accusations of his separated parents.

[9] In other paintings, Tewes decorated rooms with Rorschach-style marks or camouflage, that critics like Artforum's Ingrid Schaffner suggested were metaphors for the home as a screen for projecting primal emotions[29][32] or "a demilitarized zone" littered with land mines of secrets, lies, and broken promises.

[9] Schaffner glimpsed signs of escape through "imaginative enterprise" in Tewes's depictions of children absorbed in drawing or shadow puppets, contra their surroundings,[29] however others like the Los Angeles Times' William Wilson saw in the work a wry, but dispiriting commentary on bourgeois existence.

[33] Works like 911 (2003), Bushwomanflagbrickwall (2005), and Another Tasteful Discussion of Contemporary War (2005) featured weapons-of-war shaped clouds, well-heeled couples sharing cocktails dwarfed by a looming, camouflage painting, and other direct references to real-world political events.

In other works, gender politics dominated, with Tewes critiquing middle-class propriety with wallpaper patterned with explicit sexual acts, crumpled papers, scrawled messages, or women flashing their nude bodies from outside windows or pulled-back coats.

After she and artist Hope Sandrow met as members of the Women's Action Coalition, they developed an installation called The Other Side of the Rainbow, made solely of testimonies anonymously contributed by victims of sexual abuse, including viewers of the exhibit.

[41] She was one of the founders of the Guerrilla Girls, a controversial, anonymous collective of (initially seven) feminist, female artists who organized in 1985 to bring media attention to, and to combat, sexism in the art world.

In 2016, the Wright Gallery at Texas A&M university staged an exhibition of Guerrilla Girl protest poster art from 1985 to 2000 organized by Tewes and displayed alongside her Men in Trouble series.