Lydia Baker

b. 1990; Norfolk, Virginia; Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Lydia Baker’s drawings and paintings depict surreal and symbolic dreamscapes where female protagonists explore time, memory, and desire. Her current body of work spotlights two women navigating their intimate world, engaging with one another on deepening levels. They transcend time to inhabit both memory and fantasy, connecting spiritually and romantically to find respite and shelter. Rendered with oil paint on a textured linen surface (and as drawings with wax pastel on sanded paper), the artist applies overlays of color to achieve an optical glow. The jewel-toned figurative works mirror and process the internal cycles of the female body throughout the undulating forms, womb-like containers, and variations of water. Within each work lies interpretations of love, origin, and family. Baker is particularly fascinated by familial dynamics and reproductive technology from a lesbian perspective. How is a family composed? What is the physical and emotional experience of a biological clock? Baker explores these questions from a deeply personal place—living in a female body, her relationship, as an artist—where the smaller figures symbolize both reproductive cells and seeds of creative thought.

While Baker initially worked with oil paint as her primary medium, the pandemic shifted her studio practice and she spent 2020–2023 working exclusively in colored pencil to master her drawing technique. Her debut solo exhibition In Between (2022) with Massey Klein Gallery featured anthropomorphic landscape drawings populated by small-scale figures— narrated from a third person point of view. Baker’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Sonnet (2024), marks a turning point in the artist’s development. She has returned to oil paint several years after earning her MFA in the medium, and now creates her drawings with wax pastel and watercolor rather than colored pencil, allowing for a softer, blurred aesthetic. In addition to the medium expansion, Baker’s new paintings are narrated from a first-person point of view—two large celestial figures and their gestures—directly inspired by Baker’s life.

Baker graduated with a BFA in Communication Arts & Design from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2013 and with an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Arts in 2020.  She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Women’s Artist Residency for Transcendental Awareness in Seneca Forest, WV (2013), The Artist Teaching Residency at The Grier School in Tyrone, PA (2019), the Saltonstall Foundation Residency Program in Ithaca, NY (2021), and the Vermont Studio Center, VT (2023). Her work was recently featured in a solo viewing presentation at the London Art Fair with Wilder Gallery (London, UK) and a group exhibition at Trotter & Sholer (New York, NY). 

Her work has been featured in several print and online publications, including David Zwirner’s Platform, Juxtapoz Magazine, Artsy.com, Art Maze Magazine, New American Paintings and Arts in Square.  Baker was awarded the New York Academy of Art Merit Scholar Award (2018/19), the IEA Art Heals Grant (2020) and the New York Foundation for the Arts City Artist Corps Grant (2021).  In her final year at NYAA, Baker was awarded the Post-Graduate Chubb Fellowship (2020/21) and was selected to show in both the Chubb Insurance booth and the NYAA booth at the 2021 editions of Art Basel Miami and Art Miami, respectively.