Baker Artist Portfolios

Anael Zaia Hester is a fine arts student and up-and-coming artist who was raised in Baltimore, began her education in visual arts at Baltimore School for the Arts (class of 2020), and is currently in her last semester of being trained in academic realism at the Swedish Academy of Realist Art (SARA), a small establishment that teaches traditional artistic methods passed down from the French ateliers of the 18th/19th centuries, and shares a lineage with Leonardo Da Vinci.

Zaia believes strongly in the idea that beauty is an essential component of cultural sustainability; that, as paradoxical as it may sound, art made purely for art’s sake—art that is nothing more or less than visually beautiful—absolutely does and should play a role in society. This is the basis of an emerging artistic movement she calls Nu-Aestheticism. The Aestheticists believed that, as Oscar Wilde proclaimed, ‘all art is quite useless’, celebrating the inherent independence art has from social, moral, and utilitarian purposes in society. However, where they failed to consider possibilities like the rise of Functionalist architecture, bananas taped to museum walls, and AI “art”, is the point from which Nu-Aestheticism takes the baton, posing the pertinent question ‘what happens when society threatens to take art away from us?’

While she further develops this new concept, Zaia is primarily focused on improving her skills. She is passionate about avoiding the use of photo references, so all art displayed here was created from life and/or imagination.

She has been selected for several exhibitions both in the States and in Sweden, and won the American Visionary Art Museum Curators Choice Award in the Baltimore District Congressional Art Competition hosted by Elijah Cummings in 2018.