Julie C Baer(Julie C Baer)(@jcbaer)

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Bellingham, WA

I am a Bellingham, WA-based mixed-media nature artist with over 40 years of experience. As a teenager struggling with undiagnosed PTSD, artmaking was lifesaving for me, providing a calling, a practice, and a sense of generativity. I attended the Rhode Island School of Design and afterwards worked as a full-time artist–painting, exhibiting, visiting schools, libraries, and synagogues, and publishing two picture books–while raising my sons. In 2007, I returned to school for education, earning a master’s in 2009 (Harvard Graduate School of Education) and a doctorate in 2018 (Northeastern University), focusing on language and literacy for nontraditional and multilingual students. Until 2022, I taught academic writing to students of all ages and backgrounds, from incumbent workers at Boston hospitals to nursing students at UMass Boston and first-year Boston University students. The pandemic brought me back to the studio full-time, transformed. This year, I am participating in Surge, an art/science collaboration through the Museum of Northwest Art, and in 2024 I served as Visiting Artist at the Native Plant Trust in Massachusetts. I have exhibited and sold my work widely. View my work at https://www.juliebaer.com.

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Artist Statement

My work reflects close observation of typically overlooked scenes in nature, approaching nature’s complex design with a simultaneous respect for scientific accuracy and aesthetic freedom and abstraction. My compositions tend to lack traditional focal points, reflecting the mobile, momentary, sometimes disorienting way we encounter nature. Due to collaged elements, my surfaces are craggy and uneven. I try to surprise viewers with unusual views to induce them to respond, “I’ve seen this all my life, but I’ve never really looked at it before." I am exquisitely aware that, though nature is our collective home, human activity has caused irreparable losses of habitat, resources, and species. By revering the beauty of humble local biota, I aim to draw viewers’ attention to how everyone can contribute to rewilding. Art offers an alternative modality that can illuminate science and attract a wary viewer through their eyes and hearts. This leads to discovery and agency. Art does not provide answers, but rather causes viewers to wonder, challenges them to inquire. I see my responsibility, thus, as engaging viewers visually and emotionally, leading them to go outdoors and look around, and become motivated to learn about how they can contribute to environmental conservation and restoration.