Kristina Rose Baker

Kristina Rose Baker is an artist, educator, and consultant based in Sonoma County, California. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, arts education, and community-focused creative work.

Baker is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Florence Lief Fellowship, Gamblin Paint Award, Anderson Ranch Brooks Fellowship, and recognition as a Yale/Norfolk Fellowship Nominee. In 2025, she was awarded a grant and invited to an eight-week Artist Residency at the Arroscia Residency in Pieve di Teco, Italy. Earlier, in 2017, she served as the year-long Community Artist in Residence at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts in Highlands, North Carolina. Her work has been featured in exhibitions and publications across the United States and Europe, supported by an extensive background as an arts educator, museum preparator, art and social justice research consultant, and curatorial and advisory assistant. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2015.

Central to Baker’s artistic practice is an exploration of liminality—moments where the visible dissolves into the unseen and the physical wavers toward the metaphysical. Her figurative oil paintings and charcoal drawings capture the suspended instant when form transitions from solidity to weightlessness, engaging questions of presence, absence, risk, and transcendence. 

Baker’s paintings are highly layered surfaces—scraped, eroded, demolished, and rebuilt—where raw expressionist gestures meet fine, descriptive linework. Fleeting notations of hands, feet, aquatic life, cliffs, or reflected light anchor the compositions, offering momentary tethers to the observable world. Her charcoal drawings evolve through an additive and subtractive process: sheets of paper joined together as figures emerge from darkness, then torn, reassembled, and sanded down to reveal a visible history of revisions and erasures. Through these methods, her work meditates on impermanence, the fragility of memory, and the slow dissolution of form.

Across both painting and drawing, Baker’s work invites reflection on the paradox of consciousness as something that exists both within and beyond the body. Through the interplay of presence and disappearance, her practice opens a space of quiet introspection—an invitation to linger in the unknown.