Alice Baber | Colors of the Rainbow
November 6 - December 15, 2024
New York City
Jody Klotz and Dakota Sica host a panel discussion with preeminent author and art historian Dr. Gail Levin on the artist Alice Baber. Dr. Levin discusses Baber's work and her contribution to the New York and Paris art worlds in the middle of the century, the artist's fall into relative obscurity and ultimately her rise into the forefront of the art market. The exhibition is a passion project of Jody Klotz who fell in love with Alice Baber's paintings and approached Dr. Levin with the idea of writing on the artist's life. Dr. Levin has authored a forthcoming biography on Alice Baber as well as the forward to this exhibition's catalog.
"Alice Baber | Colors of the Rainbow" was first exhibited at Jody Klotz Fine Art in Abilene, Texas and the reprised at Leslie Feely Fine Art in New York City with the collaboration of Dakota Sica. It represents the culmination of years of work and determination to elevate the visibility of an artist that deserves much more recognition.
Alice was born in 1928 in rural Illinois and, until gas rationing began in World War II, grew up spending winters with her family in Miami, Florida. After a mid-western education, Baber moved to New York in 1951 and met many of the abstract expressionists at the Cedar Bar and The Club. From 1959-1968, she spent half of every year in Paris, France, and exhibited across Europe and in Asia. A world traveler, by the 1970s, she toured for the U.S. government, showing her art across Latin America. She is said to have been “always imaginative.” Baber later spoke about “color memory, that anything that you remember well you remember in very vivid color, and anything that’s particularly sort of gloomy becomes very gray.… My most interesting memories are in very brilliant color.” Baber wrote poetry and prose. Her published writings include essays on color in the 1970s and on Sonia Delaunay, whom she met in Paris. Baber was often featured in the New York Times and in major art publications. On December 29, 1978, the New York Times described her as “A prominent colorist since the early 60s, Alice Baber has charted a course somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting.”
She created her lyrical compositions of buoyant forms with an innovative technique involving thinned oil paint application which she called “sinking and lifting”which reveals the glow and inner light of colors.