Image: A GALLERY, Salt Lake City
A Gallery in Salt Lake City is highlighting a new body of work by Richard Baker under the title ‘Tsundoku’, presenting twenty-one new paintings on paper. The exhibition announcement describes the series as a meditation on Baker’s long relationship with books and the visual language of their covers, with each work treated as an individual painting. The show is scheduled through August 31.
The gallery’s newsletter frames the title through the Japanese term ‘tsundoku’, which it explains as the act of collecting books and letting them accumulate as a source of joy and anticipation, knowing they contain stories yet to be discovered. In the announcement, James Balla writes that he learned the word from Baker himself and that the title fits a body of work built around the artist’s “arsenal of books.” The text also emphasizes the pace of Baker’s studio work, noting that he has been working intensely to produce the catalogue of images now being shown.
According to the gallery, the exhibition consists of twenty-one books translated into twenty-one paintings, “each a world unto itself.” That formulation places the project in a line of Baker’s practice that treats books not only as objects of reading but also as subjects for painting. The artist’s source text suggests that the accumulation of books can be both a source of anticipation and a prompt for image-making, with the surfaces, titles and covers becoming the basis for new paintings on paper.
The announcement also situates Baker within a substantial professional history. It states that his work is included in public and private collections, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum, Sarasota Springs, New York, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. It adds that he has received awards from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Baker’s teaching and residency history is also outlined in the gallery’s materials. The text says he has been a visiting artist 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. It notes long-standing involvements with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, Massachusetts, where he conducts workshops. The announcement says he taught for eleven years at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Victoria.
The gallery’s mailing directs viewers to the exhibition webpage and invites inquiries by email or telephone. It also mentions that a preview of several works is available through linked images in the announcement. For the main exhibition, the only verified presentation details given are the title ‘Tsundoku’, the fact that it features twenty-one new paintings on paper by Richard Baker, and that it runs through August 31.
