Baker Artist Portfolios

Wickerham & Lomax is the collaborative name of Baltimore-based artists Daniel Wickerham (b. 1986, Columbus, OH) and Malcolm Lomax (b. 1986, Abbeville, SC). Their practice begins with codes—private symbolisms, gossip, inside jokes, and the low-stakes chatter that organizes real social life. They treat this accelerated exchange of “frivolous” information as material: something worth formalizing, staging, and giving dignity.

Our installations operate like social environments where images are asked to behave—to mimic, to seduce, to miscommunicate, and to respond to the contexts they’re placed in. The work flips between first and third person because collaboration always pulls between the individual and the collective. Friendship itself becomes a form.

We use CGI, industrial materials, double-sided prints, and staged display systems to examine how social categories are produced—often informally—through nightlife, subculture, debauchery, and communal gathering. These installations become speculative ecologies where contexts overlap, collapse, or mutate into new proposals for living.

Since 2009, our projects have drawn from digital logic, nightlife thinking, and what we call neo-orality: images and texts that behave more like conversation than proclamation. We also borrow from jank space—the improvisational, make-do conditions of contemporary life—using it as a site of invention rather than scarcity.

Recurring themes include birthing, parenting, surrogacy, avian mimicry, and camouflage. We’re drawn to collaborative pairs—Watson & Crick, Proenza Schouler, Fran Lebowitz & Toni Morrison—as mirrors for our own partnership and as reminders that creativity is rarely solitary.

Our studio functions more like a nursery than a factory: ideas are raised, not produced. Collaboration follows the cuckoo’s strategy—co-authorship without inheritance, variation without purity. We don’t care who made it; we care who will raise it. Or at least who’s willing to babysit.

In 2021, the Baltimore Museum of Art acquired Romance as Intrusion for its permanent collection, and that same year Artforum commissioned the duo for its Project series. Wickerham & Lomax are recipients of the 2020 Trawick Best in Show Prize and the 2015 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize. In 2025, they completed Soft Gym, a public art and park commission for Inviting Light, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the City of Baltimore.