Carrie Ann Baade 

Carrie Ann Baade is an American painter whose work deeply engages with art history. By quoting, interacting with, and reclaiming masterpieces in a surreal, biographical narrative, Baade creates a unique dialogue with the past.

“As the steward and axman,” Baade says, “I return to haunting moments in art history to pick through the ‘boneyard’ of painting with reverence. I am a scavenger salvaging lost aesthetics seeking to reclaim, not merely as a quotation. Composing with a woman’s voice, the oil painting is the basis for dialog with the art’s past through complex imagery that unburdens the restrictions of a feminist psyche. These are paintings made of paintings, fractured and altered to bare my psychological revelations and exhumed life lessons.”

She continues, “Mining imagery from Renaissance and Baroque paintings, these fragments provide a foundation to construct layered narratives that resemble fantastical parables. The compositions combine personal and classical symbology with luminescent color, communicating themes of mortality, sexuality, personal transformation, and the darker side of human nature. Rejecting the rational vision of life, this artwork values the magic of the subconscious and the strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded, and the unconventional.”

Raised on the front range of Colorado, Baade received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, and earned her MFA from the University of Delaware. She currently works in Tallahassee, where she is a full Professor of Painting and Drawing at Florida State University.

Since 2005, Baade has had more than 30 solo exhibitions and participated in over 250 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her solo exhibits include shows at the Pensacola Art Museum (2022), Mesa Contemporary Museum of Art (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville (2012), Delaware Contemporary (2007), La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles (2018), and Ningbo Art Museum in China (2007). Her work has also been featured in notable group exhibitions at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the Harwood Museum in Taos, the Instituto de America de Santa Fe in Granada, Spain, and the Centrum Promocji Kultury Warszawa Praga Południe in Poland.

Baade’s accolades include a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship Award and a Delaware Division of the Arts Award for Established Artist in Painting.

EXHIBITION DETAILS

Carrie Ann Baade: Mirror Worlds

September 6 – November 23, 2024

Museum of Art – DeLand

600 N. Woodland Blvd. DeLand, Florida 32720

Admission: Members Free | Future Members $5

Image: Carrie Ann Baade, Conscious and Unconscious, Oil on panel