Brenda Baker is an artist, writer, mother and Vice President of Exhibits, Facilities and Strategic Initiatives at Madison Children’s Museum. In each arena, she is inspired by children, her family and the natural world, and connects the fields of art, ecology, and cultural geography.
Though resolutely abstract, Brenda’s paintings are both landscape and figurative, huddling in that space between clarity and fog, memory and forgetting, with ambiguous, ragged edges. She works with layers of paint and beeswax, scraping, painting, carving and layering over and over again, revealing and concealing what went before, akin to the way memory is both evoked and lost, specific and hazy. Brenda’s work has been shown around the world and is held in collections in Europe, Canada, South America and the Untied States.
She has an MFA in painting and sculpture from UW-Madison, an undergraduate degree from DePauw University, and is the recipient of numerous awards including an NEA grant in sculpture, an Arts Midwest Fellowship. Along with Bird Ross, Brenda is co-founder of the Forward Art Prize and the Women Artists Forward Fund, the third largest prize for women artists in the country. When not creating, she can be found chasing her husband, two grown boys, a dog and assorted small farm animals, including two goats and a miniature donkey named Olive, on bikes or cross country skis.
Image: Brenda Baker, Head First, 5 x 7 inches, acrylic, pencil, on playing card.