Excerpt from Alice Baber: Touching the Sky
By Dan Cameron
“An abstract painting is outer space, and I am in front of it, suspended.” —Alice Baber
A forty-year gap that’s difficult to reconcile exists in our collective experience of Alice Baber’s paintings, no matter how accustomed we’ve become in recent years to the pattern of re-discoveries of brilliant and accomplished midcentury modernist painters and sculptors, typically women, who were seriously undervalued during their lifetimes (often in comparison to their more celebrated husbands), and further sidelined after they were no longer alive. Understood as such, Baber’s case is an especially poignant example of that trend, as she spent many years actively lobbying for women artists to receive greater recognition, and it’s even more poignant because she died of cancer at the age of fifty-four, when many of her contemporaries were still at the height of their careers. Furthermore, her stylistic niche of color-based abstraction had long since peaked by 1980, even reached a sort of nadir in terms of critical and curatorial taste. Such context is necessary if one is to address the matter of how, during the four decades between Baber’s death in 1983 and 2023, when her work was reintroduced to New Yorkers, there was essentially zero visibility in her own city for her art. The final twist to the puzzle is that it now appears to be the case that her paintings transmit their meaning to viewers more eloquently today than they did during her lifetime, when there never seemed to be a critical consensus over what her work was about....
Essay by Dan Cameron
Biography by Lisa N. Peters, PhD
Designed by Mark Robinson
Photography by Roz Akin
Published by Berry Campbell and printed by GHP Media
