Poignant Pics no. 27: On Francis Baker's “Barrier”
Welcome to no. 27 in our series Poignant Pics. In this issue, our editor Diana Nicholette Jeon writes about Francis Baker’s image “Barrier” and how she felt when seeing it for the first time.
LET’S TALK ABOUT BREAKING DOWN BARRICADES…
Very recently, Blue Mitchell chose Francis Baker’s work as the banner image in the One Twelve Alumni group on Facebook. I’d been casually familiar with Baker’s work for a few years now, mainly the images with shipping boats. But it wasn’t until that particular day that I had ever conversed with Francis about the conceptual underpinnings he chooses to convey to his viewers.
Barrier
The brief conversation beneath the post sparked me to look more deeply at his work, which ultimately led me to this image. This work, created in 2017, is entitled Barrier and is gum bichromate on a 9" X 80.5" panel. Having used bound hands in one of my own works a few years ago, it grabbed at me right away. The work is utterly beautiful, in the same painterly manner that all Baker’s work is. But it was what he had written, the intent of the work that kept me there, lingering, wanting to feel as well as to see.
This is what Francis said about this work: “This work was born out of a conversation I had with Nabu, those are his hands in the image. He was enlightening me on the circular social injustice of our prison systems. As we were talking, he stayed behind his three and a half-foot-tall plywood barrier. I had to lean in to understand what he was saying, he self-identified from the West Indies. This day, I was handing out sandwiches, oranges and water. I felt more comfortable giving something as a way to talk and explore the homeless crises enveloping my chosen city and much of our country. I wanted to talk to him, to find out what he thought might be a solution to the worsening homeless crisis. My position was that individuals can help, that we are a society of individuals and If everyone sees and feels and helps and just acts human, then the crisis could be solved. He laughed at the idea of a solution. He relayed to me that lasting change has to come from the system. It is the system that locks up its youth and has for-profit prisons and no support after a person completes his time. Instead of support, they are thrown back out into the street, this time with a stigma that holds them back from getting a job. As a way to talk about this, I made works barrier and barricade. The blue on the top is an image of a blue tarp and the bottom panel is raw plywood. These materials are ubiquitous in the making of temporary shelters here in Oakland.”
Baker’s work is excruciatingly beautiful, somewhere between painting, printmaking, photography, and sometimes even sculpture. But what I most enjoy about his work is that he pulls people in via that beauty, but forces them to think about serious contemporary social issues once they have drawn close. Bravo, Francis Baker! I eagerly await seeing and hearing your views on contemporary American issues over the coming years.
- Diana Nicholette Jeon
Bio
Francis Baker is a self-taught artist working with alternative process photography, painting and sculpture. In 1994, Francis began exhibiting his artwork in Chicago, IL. National exhibits in Miami, Santa Fe, and San Francisco, as well as, international exhibits in Paris and Switzerland followed. Born in WI, Francis Baker was adopted into a working-class family. Baker was raised to believe his nationality was Syrian. As an adult, his birth mother contacted him and said the adoption agency made a mistake. She told him that he is Sicilian. Years later, when she passed, he discovered his birth father was indeed a first-generation Syrian immigrant. This ‘identity mixup’ formed a basis of his artistic investigations into factors that shape one’s core beliefs. Themes of social justice, inequity, homelessness, and mental health are key subjects. His recent work explores environmental justice and the climate crisis which is causing extinction level events.
In 2018, he received the fellowship residency award at The Image Flow, in Mill Valley, to continue developing is unique process of gum bichromate on panel. In 2019, he received a fellowship to the KALA Art Institute and in 2020 his work was included at the De Young Museum. Francis Baker’s work has been featured in Divergents Magazine, De Young Museum’s Fine Arts Magazine, Diffusion X published by One Twelve. Baker’s work on the homeless crisis in Oakland, Ca is collected, along with poems from homeless mothers, into an anthology called Colossus: Home.
More of his work may be found on his website.
Diana Nicholette Jeon is a Honolulu, HI-based artist and an editor at One Twelve publications.