"Over the years Baker’s work has shown her knack for what looks like a perilous travel on the borderline of kitsch. Though this line is a swampy one, she managed to give the feeling of being perched up somewhere, her feet remaining clean, and still stomping with assertion. Kitsch, for her, seemed not just an exploration of dubious taste. The enterprise was also about play with forbidden taste, subversion of highbrow arrogance, poking the provincial attitudes of hegemony that determine and separate the good and valid from the bad and invalid.

Baker is and always has been a really good painter, an academic painter who at the same time keeps a critical distance from academic painting. Or maybe, a non-academic painter who, in her wish to poke her finger in the wrong places, fakes academic painting. She manages to have it both ways, doing impeccable work and also making fun of it. In this way she effectively blurs the division between art and kitsch, but not completely letting on which of both she is enriching."

Luis Camnitzer
New York, NY

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