Artist Statement

Brenda Baker is a Wisconsin native who learned to knit, sew, build, write, paint, draw, and appreciate the natural world from her family and fabulous teachers. Her work resonates from those early roots and is grounded in place, family, and craft.

Baker’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and installations have been shown around the globe. She has an MFA in painting from UW-Madison and a BA in studio art from DePauw University. She studied at the Austro-American Institute in Vienna, Austria, and Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, Hungary. Her numerous awards include an NEA grant, an Arts Midwest Fellowship, a Noyce Fellowship, a Badger Bioneer and Sustainability Visionary of the Year Awards, and countless local Madison Arts Commission and Dane Arts grants. Along with artist Bird Ross, Baker co-founded the Forward Art Prize and the Women Artists Forward Fund in 2017, now the country’s third-largest prize for women artists.

Baker splits her time between making art, ecological restoration at her family’s farm, and overseeing the exhibit, sustainability and strategic initiatives at Madison Children’s Museum, where she has worked for more than three decades. When not making things, she can be found chasing her two grown boys and husband on bikes
or cross county skis, or tending to her family’s flock of small farm animals in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin, a peacock, donkey, and goats, among them.