Rushern Baker IV
American painter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rush Baker IV[1] (born September 10, 1987) is an American painter, assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago,[2] and past candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates to represent District 22 in Prince George's County.[3][4][5]
Early life and education
Baker was born in Washington, DC on September 10, 1987, to Prince George's County Executive Rushern L. Baker, III[3] and the late Christa Beverly.[6] When he was four years old, his family moved to Cheverly, Maryland. Baker attended Prince George's County public schools and graduated from Suitland High School in Forestville, Maryland. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cooper Union in 2009 and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting/printmaking from Yale University in 2012,[7] where he was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award for outstanding achievement in drawing or painting from nature.[8]
Career
After graduating from Yale, Baker moved back to Prince George's County. He is a self-employed artist whose work is greatly influenced by politics,[5] and have been described as being "heavily influenced by author Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels, most notably Parable of the Sower."[9] In a 2013 interview, he said “I want my paintings to generate a discourse around policy, especially foreign policy."[10] Baker's work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in Maryland, DC, New York, Connecticut, California, North Carolina, Dubai, and Japan,[11][8] and he was a lecturer at the University of Maryland[12] on drawing and two-dimensional design from 2012 to 2014. Baker previously coordinated a publicly funded mobile arts program for youth. He is a former artist-in-residence at 39th Street Gallery, a part of The Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood, Maryland.[13] In 2023, he was a Trawick Prize finalist and an Artsy Foundations Prize finalist in 2024. Baker was a 2024-2025 Grant Wood Art Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in Art at the University of Iowa.[2] Baker is currently an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute Chicago (SAIC).[2]
In discussing Baker's 2019 exhibition at Washington, DC's Hemphill Fine Arts, the reviewing art critic asserted that "Baker’s energetic and frenetic abstractions invoke a range of concerns, from the perils of living while black and the widening income gap to the proliferation of alternative facts and weaponized technology."[14]
In June 2022, Baker took over as campaign manager of his father's gubernatorial campaign after his previous campaign manager, Andrew Mallinoff, stepped down.[15] His father suspended his campaign later that month.[16] In January 2023, Baker filed to run for the nomination to fill the vacancy left by Alonzo T. Washington in District 22 of the Maryland House of Delegates.[17] On February 8, after Washington endorsed Baker's opponent Ashanti Martinez, Baker announced that he would no longer run for the vacancy.[18]
Baker was a delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, pledged to Kamala Harris.[19]
