John Baeder: America — John Baeder

ACA Galleries is pleased to announce John Baeder's second solo exhibition at the gallery in collaboration with MB Abram. The show includes paintings from Baeder's personal collection, including his final series of matchbook covers completed in 2018.

An inveterate collector and cataloguer of Americana, folk art, classic cars, vintage postcards, matchbook covers and decorative arts, Baeder amassed a vast collection of ephemera from his numerous road trips, flea market visits and vintage thrift shops. These materials were a constant source of inspiration for his paintings.

His early artworks depict the optimism of Postwar America: diners with streamlined designs and other icons of roadside popular culture — motels and campgrounds reliant on a thriving new economy which allowed for many to own automobiles for the first time and enjoy more leisure activity; the paintings embody a sense of hope and prosperity. The later artwork demonstrates the decline and decay of these places, marking a shift away from the idealism that pervades the earlier artwork. Baeder's paintings are not only documents of changing America; they also function as a mirror of 20th century American society.

Born in 1938, Baeder moved to New York in 1964 to be the Art Director for the Marschalk Company. Although successful in advertising, his first love was painting, which he pursued in the evenings after work. In 1972 Ivan Karp, founder of the legendary gallery OK Harris, scheduled a visit and immediately offered the artist a solo show. Baeder promptly quit his job and dedicated the rest of his career to painting. He exhibited exclusively with OK Harris until the gallery closed in 2014.

Baeder's artwork can be found in numerous museum collections including the Smithsonian Institution, NY; Denver Art Museum, CO; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; among many others. In 2007 the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia organized the retrospective exhibition and accompanying book Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats Along the Way: The Paintings of John Baeder. Other books about the artist's work include John Baeder's Road Well Taken, Jay Williams (2015) and Diners by Vincent Scully (1977).