Art + Artists

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 the imperfect feelings of failure, loneliness, and dissatisfaction. Baldwin's multidisciplinary and research-based work uses textiles and drawings to create serial and narrative forms. She shares her time between Ithaca and the Hudson Valley, where she teaches drawing at Bard College. She is the recipient of a

2022 New York State Council on the Arts grant and has been awarded residencies at, among others, McColl Center (Summer 2025), Women’s Studio Workshop, 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 Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse), Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum at

Cornell University; Rosefsky Gallery at Binghamton University; String Room Gallery at Wells College; Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Concepto Hudson; and Corners Gallery, Ithaca, New York. Upcoming solo exhibitions at Dowd Gallery (SUNY Cortland, January-March 2025), Albany International Airport (June-October 2025) and Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca College, October-December 2025).