Baker Artist Portfolios

The paintings in this project explore gesture as a mark and as time embedded in the surface. Through masking, layers are obscured and later revealed to form a non-linear progression. The physical intertwining of past and present creates an emotional and contemplative space.

A performance art piece in which the artist uses the metaphor of whitening toothpaste to illuminate the racial changes taking place in Washington, DC's historic U Street corridor.

Tummyache was inspired by the craft of hand-painted signs and the advertising imagery of my youth. The paintings explore the collision of desire, satisfaction, overindulgence and nausea. At once, they revel in and critique the temptation ever-present in a consumer landscape of overly sweetened products and over-saturated images.

To create this image I took a dowel and cut it into an even number of pieces. I painted each piece with black and white paint. Every segment has an inverse segment painted as its opposite. If all of the segments were arranged back in a straight line it would be continuous, with no gaps. This piece is about completion.

When I saw the water flowing down the streets of North Avenue in the fall of 2012, I was not surprised. There was a time when a person could get a drink of clean water from the Jones Falls River: the river that flows beneath our cars as we rush to get to the next place we need to be to make more money to buy more things to acquire more debt. I felt inspired to record this happening: the moment when the water that ran through an old piping system exploded.

I've known; rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow
of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went
down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all
golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

An assemblage of the black female body in popular culture through the lens of The Hottentot Venus. This performance includes projections of words, sounds, and images of contemporary online mass-distributed images juxtaposed with photos and imagery from the 19th century. 2012.

Smile I
This work was created in response to unrest that was happening in The United States while I was abroad on an artist residency in Iceland. At the time, the Ferguson uprising was happening, I was asked to participate in a curated project called Black Joy. The group show as curated by a cultural organizer in Ohio who wanted to examine the concept of black joy in the face of generations of inter-sectional oppression.

#USA!

This project began as a conversation with 3 other artists about what the process of naming and renaming is and means in different communities. The Nature of Nomenclature was a group piece. Within this ensemble of performances, "no names to gods names her name" was a solo piece that explores the action and process of naming in individuals within the family structure and the naming of groups of people in the society structure.