Baker Artist Portfolios

Anna Child (b. 1978, Camden, South Carolina) is a Baltimore-based artist working in painting and printmaking. Her practice uses abstraction to treat uncertainty as a productive condition rather than a problem to be solved.
Working through disruption—shifts in scale, unfamiliar materials, and parallel processes—Child interrupts fluency to keep attention responsive. Surfaces develop through rupture and repair: layering, scraping, cutting, reversing, and reassembling. Seams, accretions, and structural shifts remain visible, allowing the work to stay provisional and alive.
Child approaches painting as a relational system rather than a linear one. Rather than proposing progress as resolution or improvement, her work models how meaning emerges through accumulation, proximity, and feedback. Small gestures exert disproportionate force, and decisions ripple across surfaces over time, making interdependence visible without erasing what came before.
Color operates as interruption and insistence—moving between restraint and pressure. Joy in the work is not decorative or expressive; it emerges through staying with difficulty and contradiction. Shaped by living in Baltimore, the practice understands making as a form of improvisation, care, and resilience under constraint.
Child often works in groups of paintings and prints that hold together through relationship rather than similarity. Her practice treats abstraction as a way to hold complexity without closure, and the studio as a rehearsal space for alternative models of connection, agency, and becoming.