Author: Yau, John
Title: John Walker, New Work. April 29 - June 17 2023
Description: New York, Alexandre Fine Art Inc, 2023. Softcover. Small Square Quarto. Softcover. Blue wraps with white titles. Unpaginated. Jennifer Baker is a painter and sculptor working in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia since 1978. She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts) as well as the Art Students League in New York. Baker has exhibited at Art 101 and Pleiades Galleries in New York and Projects Gallery, Nexus Gallery, F.A.N. Gallery, the Crane Arts Building and The Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. She has received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship for Works on Paper and had a Challenge Exhibit at Fleisher Art Memorial. She has also been a finalist for a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. In 2018, Baker received a Leeway Foundation Window of Opportunity Grant and in 2010 she received a Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant. In 2014, Baker curated an exhibit about the history of Northern Liberties “From World’s Workshop to Hipster Mecca and the People in Between” for the Philadelphia History Museum. She is the visual art consultant for “Supper, People on the Move,” a multimedia performance piece by Silvana Cardell funded by the Pew Foundation for Arts & Heritage. Baker created “Portraits of People on the Move” a companion exhibit of stories and photographs of Philadelphia-area immigrants. After opening in Philadelphia, “Supper” and “Portraits” toured throughout the country as well as in the Dominican Republic. In 2019, Baker had her first solo museum exhibition at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Loretto, PA: “Third Street: Paintings and Monoprints by Jennifer Baker.” In his recent work, zigzag lines and various shape motifs denote the repetitive character of tides, weather patterns, and the natural rhythms exposed by extended meditation upon the sea. A palette of jewel-like cobalt blue and green often contrasts against muddy brown, black, and a crisp white that seems to speak to the spaces in-between, the things unseen. Several of these paintings hold reference to Cézanne’s The Black Marble Clock (1869-70), in which a handless clock and large seashell are presented on a linen-draped table. Both the shell and clock appear in Walker’s new work, represented in amorphous shapes and circular outlines which evoke the artist’s ongoing reflection upon the passing of time. Still other works reference the powerful swooping forms of the fishing nets used to capture eels in the Pemaquid river, which runs past his studio on its way to the nearby bay and Atlantic Ocean. In this vocabulary of color and form, Walker illuminates the passive ephemerality of the natural world and a resounding, intimate connection between artist and place. As new.

Keywords: European Artists ; Walker, John ; ;


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