Lydia Baker

b. 1990; Norfolk, Virginia; Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Lydia Baker’s practice focuses on constructive escapism, exploring and redefining modern perceptions of joy, acceptance, and home.  As a draftswoman, printmaker and painter, Baker creates utopian and matriarchal worlds.  Within these imagined feminine environments, landscapes echo the interiors of bodies and figures explore, adapt, and plant themselves firmly, representative of a resting place after conflict and “ripe for new growth and possibility.”  Baker works intuitively, without a fully planned composition, allowing both the artist and the viewer to “[savor] the landscape and the pendulum between curiosity and stability.”  As a child, the hours spent exploring, playing and existing in the wild garden surrounding her house allowed her to discover the concept of creation - the act or process of bringing something into existence.  Committed to a lifelong exploration, this concept has blossomed in the artist’s work as she has continued to re-evaluate the idea of home, both as it exists internally within the mind and body and externally within our physiological relationship with nature.  To Baker, home exists when we are comfortable, grounded and calm, having found sanctuary and harmony within the unknown.  

Baker graduated with a BFA in Communication Arts & Design from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 and with an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Arts in 2020.  She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Women’s Artist Residency for Transcendental Awareness in Seneca Forest, WV (2013), The Artist Teaching Residency at The Grier School in Tyrone, PA (2019), the Saltonstall Foundation Residency Program in Ithaca, NY (2021), and the Vermont Studio Center, VT (2023). Her work was recently featured in a solo viewing presentation at the London Art Fair with Wilder Gallery (London, UK) and a group exhibition at Trotter & Sholer (New York, NY). 

Her work has been featured in several print and online publications, including David Zwirner’s Platform, Juxtapoz Magazine, Artsy.com, Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings and Arts in Square.  Baker was awarded the New York Academy of Art Merit Scholar Award (2018/19), the IEA Art Heals Grant (2020) and the New York Foundation for the Arts City Artist Corps Grant (2021).  In her final year at NYAA, Baker was awarded the Post-Graduate Chubb Fellowship (2020/21) and was selected to show in both the Chubb Insurance booth and the NYAA booth at the 2021 editions of Art Basel Miami and Art Miami, respectively.