Image: Albert Merola Gallery, Massachusetts
Richard Baker’s new exhibition ‘Tsundoku’ opens August 1 at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, with twenty-one new paintings on paper centered on the Japanese concept of collecting books and letting them accumulate as a source of joy and anticipation. The gallery describes the project as Baker’s homage to his own overabundance of books, with each work treated as its own self-contained world.
The title takes its cue from a term Baker himself introduced to the gallery, according to the exhibition text. In the gallery’s description, ‘Tsundoku’ refers to the act of gathering books and allowing them to build up while still deriving pleasure from the promise they hold. That idea is used as the framing device for the new body of work, which links Baker’s painting practice to the visual and imaginative life of books.
James Balla, writing in the exhibition material, describes the project as a response to Baker’s shelves of accumulated titles and says the resulting group of works amounts to “twenty-one books, twenty-one paintings, each a world unto itself.” The same text connects the theme not only to reading but to painting the myriad covers waiting to be depicted, casting the exhibition as an exploration of abundance, anticipation, and discovery through image-making.
Albert Merola Gallery presents the show as an online preview as well as an exhibition announcement, and the email campaign invites viewers to click through to the exhibition webpage. The gallery’s materials do not specify a closing date in the source provided, but they do identify August 1 as the opening date for the new paintings on paper in Provincetown.
The gallery also situates Baker within a broad professional context. According to the exhibition text, his work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. The same material lists awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Baker’s background, as described by the gallery, includes visiting-artist roles at the University of Iowa, Boston University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Art in New York, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. The gallery also notes long-standing involvement with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Massachusetts, where he conducts workshops, as well as an eleven-year teaching tenure at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
The announcement closes with the practical details of the exhibition and the gallery’s contact information for inquiries. Albert Merola Gallery is presenting ‘Tsundoku’ in Provincetown from August 1, with a special online preview available through the gallery’s exhibition webpage.
