Alice Baber was born in Charleston, Illinois, in 1928 and raised between the American Midwest and the Florida Everglades—regions whose vivid natural environments informed her lifelong exploration of color and light. Her early engagement with watercolor laid the foundation for a career defined by luminous abstraction and a deep inquiry into the visual and emotional resonance of color.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Baber spent 6 months of the year in Paris, where she interacted with American and Canadian artists and met fellow painter Paul Jenkins, whom she briefly married in 1964. The two shared midwestern origins and a passion for collecting art, as well as a preoccupation with theories of light and color. Baber’s unique stain-and-lift technique, executed through the application of layers of thinned oil paint with fine linen rags over gesso primed canvases, results in works with a fluid quality. Tonal variations in the paint result from lifting the pigment with cloth, entangling color and transparency, and producing intervals of light. Her airy forms exhibit perpetual gentle movement. The ovoid form, which recurs throughout her oeuvre, served as a visual cornerstone—what she called “an infinite range of possibilities for color and light.”
By 1973, Baber had become an active voice in the Feminist movement, championing the visibility and advancement of women artists. She participated in the Women Choose Women January 1973 exhibition, featuring prominent Feminist artists Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, and Faith Ringgold. A passionate advocate for women in the arts, Baber delivered a talk at the Women’s Caucus for Art emphasizing the importance of recognition for female artists. She became a trustee of New York’s Women’s Interart Center and curated numerous exhibitions throughout the 1970s with the explicit intention of promoting the work of female artists.
Alice Baber’s work insistently investigates a transcendent realm of fluidity, color, light, and space. The vibrant interplay between these dynamics produces forms devoid of definitive boundaries, dancing in infinite light and space. Through nuanced color arrangement, Baber plays color against light, creating swirling, intimate surfaces of motion and spectacle. Her titles frequently use terms related to movement: swirls, ladders, wind, bridges, wheels, swings, reflecting her conviction that shape, size, placement, and hue can together formally evoke the appearance of color in slow, undulating, sensuous motion across landscapes of light.