I am an artist working with labor-intensive mark-making, textile manipulation, and sculpture to examine the roles of imagination and effort as shared, necessary tools of both the artist and the utopian. I make work about people without depicting them by scrambling found objects, textures, and highly rendered surfaces to create the lonely interiors and blueprints of remnant or newly imagined worlds. I pay attention to the historically under-recognized depth of female experience: the ghostly trace of women’s past lives, the earnestness of present-day feminism/s and queerness, and the aspirational hopefulness (and often, contradictory aims) of utopian liberation.

Mara Baldwin is an artist whose work focuses on the impossible dream of utopia and asks if a perfect life can include feelings of failure, loneliness, and dissatisfaction. The work on view in As I Progress at Jennifer Terzian Gallery concludes a long study of the Shakers, their work and legacy, and thinking through their existential decline through the inheritance of the final members. What happens when the fundamental beliefs of a community stop bending to serve the needs and survival of its membership? Baldwin’s multidisciplinary and research-based work uses textiles and drawings to create serial and narrative forms. She shares her time between the Hudson Valley and Ithaca, NY where she teaches drawing at Bard College and Cornell University, respectively. She is the recipient of a 2022 New York State Council on the Arts grant and has been awarded residencies at, among others, Wassaic Project, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency program, Ucross Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, Djerassi, and Saltonstall. Recent solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum at Cornell University; the Rosefsky Gallery at Binghamton University; the String Room Gallery at Wells College; the Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Concepto Hudson; and Corners Gallery, Ithaca, New York. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Everson Museum in Summer 2023