Baker Artist Portfolios

Baltimore-based multi-media artist, Gina Pierleoni, brings individual elements together to create a more cohesive and loving whole.  Through ongoing projects in painting, sculpture, installation, exhibitions, and writing, Pierleoni builds communities and experiences that change how we perceive ourselves and one another. Pierleoni uses a variety of investigations to question who and what we value. 

For instance, Pierleoni created and produced Objects Made Holy in 2026 as a love letter to Baltimore City. Forty-two diverse, intergenerational Baltimore City residents she knew chose objects based on personal significance, linking to culture, ancestry, history and identity. Each revered item provides an emotional tether, or possesses healing powers even if those powers are invisible. In a partnership with the historic Peale Museum in Baltimore, these items, along with their stories, became a community engaged project which included an exhibition, film and programming. The project was inspired by Pierleoni’s grandmother’s wooden spoon, the one she learned to cook with as a child. 

Stories, relationships and objects deeply inspire her work. Pierleoni grew up in a sprawling Italian immigrant family in New York that spanned the Bronx, Queens and later Long Island and New Rochelle. Family, food, and prayer were core tenets. American first, Italian second. The series, The Family Remains, features her family’s cooking pot lids as stand-ins for cultural transmission and wisdom from 'the old country'.  The Spoon, The Pot and The Rosary is one of these paintings. 

Tearing Prayers, a ritual-based project, uses her grandmother's sauce pot, the place Pierleoni learned to cook, as its container. Small paper arrows are hand-torn from old paintings and to-do lists then placed in the pot. Like the rosary beads of her youth, they are imbued with intentional prayers. This ongoing project started in 2015. 

Faces, her portrait series, pushes past labels and judgements with a goal of ‘de-separating’ us. These mixed media paintings of real people center empathy and our common humanity. When installed as a group, as in Painted Stories, they become a community or congregation. This ongoing series, with over 300 portraits to date, started in 1992 in an attempt to find her own voice. 

The series Human Icons records a transformative moment in the people they depict. The making process echoes this shift. Older paintings are reworked into larger configurations by tearing, layering, and scraping through the paint. Ghosted images peek through. Birds sometimes appear as ambassadors of deep change. Percolation Pose is part of this series.

Pierleoni’s obsessively Hand-Sewn Figures are made from castoffs and objects headed to the landfill. Measuring up to 27 inches, this ongoing series echoes her portraits in their humanity. She started creating them in 1992 as a therapy to successfully quit smoking. 

Painting Rag Shirts are what they are: four decades of saved T-shirt scraps used as rags in the studio, then sewn together to create whole shirts that bears the history of her paintings.  

Who and what we value, concepts that runs through Pierleoni’s entire body of work, comes full circle in Your Story Here, a 2026 reinterpretation of the United States flag. Through written words and color, tribal nations already living here before the New World was ‘discovered’ are represented alongside people from every country globally. A bamboo roof with cotton fringe transforms the flag into a structure that houses all of us. Your Story Here is on view at the historic Star-Spangled Flag House in Baltimore through 2027.

In 2026, Gina Pierleoni received a Maryland State Arts Council Creativity Grant. In 2025, she was awarded a Community Creator’s Fund Grant from The Peale Museum. The Pollock Krasner Foundation sponsored Pierleoni's 2025 residency at Byrdcliffe AIR. In 2024, Pierleoni was awarded a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship.  Individual Artist Awards include grants from: Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts; the Gottlieb Foundation (emergency grant); three from Maryland State Arts Council.  In 2020, she was acknowledged with an 'Exceptional Achievement as an Adjunct Faculty Member in Arts & Humanities from Harford Community College.  Pierleoni was recognized as a ‘Hero in the MICA Community’ in 2011. 

Pierleoni earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and a BFA from the Collecge of New Rochelle (now Mercy College) in NY. She is an Adjunct Professor at Stevenson University.

Solo exhibition sites include: Stevenson University, Stevenson, MD; Creative Alliance, Baltimore; Uferwerk, Werder, Germany; CCBC, Baltimore; Mooney Gallery, New Rochelle, NY; Craig Flinner Gallery, Baltimore; Gallery 10, Washington, DC; School 33 Art Center, Baltimore.  

Group exhibition sites include: Kleinart/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY, The Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, Baltimore; Courthouse Galleries, Portsmouth, VA; The Peale Museum, Baltimore; SBM Gallery, Baltimore; Towson University, MD; Notre Dame University of Maryland, Baltimore; Fortezza da Basso, Florence, Italy; Angel Orensanz Foundation, NY/NY; Betsy Underground Gallery, Miami Beach, FL; WPA/Corcoran, Washington, DC; Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; Maxwell Fine Arts, Peekskill, NY.