Painting the corners: On themes of time and space in American Baseball

Painting the corners: On themes of time and space in American Baseball is available for booking through 2028.

Painting the corners is a traveling exhibition of art by artist Hilary Baker, organized by independent curator Kristina Newhouse. With prose panels by Jesse Nathan, poet, UC Berkeley professor, and founding editor of the McSweeney’s Poetry Series.

From a distance, the baseball field—a ruddy diamond bedded in vivid green grass—inspires associations about centuries of pastoral and sacred spaces in paintings, poetry, and prose poems. For people who follow the game, baseball has its own set of symbols, heroes, and villains. Its rules, the bipartite give-and-take of the inning as its unit of play, as well as the personal and idiosyncratic rituals of each player reinforce a sense of the mythic. Then there is the game’s circular rhythm, which echoes life’s cycles, and like life, can eke at a bucolic, almost drowsy pace. But stillness gives way to explosive action, followed by outcries from participants and spectators alike:

What just happened?

Baseball’s visual and emotional impact makes it a rich subject for artists and writers, serving as a metaphor for human triumph and struggle, often with existential and cosmic themes. Artist Hilary Baker has created two series of imaginative paintings about baseball, separated by 36 years of lived experience.

In 2023, Baker read an opinion essay in the New York Times by Jesse Nathan about how the pitch clock in Major League Baseball has changed the cadence of the game. In this piece, “Baseball has lost its poetry,” Nathan decries the loss of the baseball game as a “place in our subdivided lives in which we get to imagine—to feel, to daydream— something existing outside of time.” Nathan’s sentiments resonated to Baker, who began to correspond with the poet. Baker invited Nathan to write about existential and durational aspects of baseball, as well as his reactions to her paintings.

Their shared experience culminates in Painting the Corners: On themes of time and space in American Baseball, an exhibition of artworks by Hilary Baker presented in juxtaposition with Jesse Nathan’s observations, entitled A Baseball Reality.

The exhibition includes 31 paintings, ranging from 5 ½ x 6 inches to 8 ¾ x 36 inches. PDF diagrams for hanging all artworks and text panels to be provided. All artworks are crated for travel. A sample press release, exhibition labels, introductory text by Kristina Newhouse, artist narrative by Hilary Baker, prose by Jesse Nathan, and a checklist to be provided electronically.

For more information about Painting the Corners and to view the full travel prospectus, please visit https://www.whattheartistsays.com/newhouse-projects

Booking Contact:

Kristina Newhouse

Artist Legacy Consultant and Curator

What the artist says

kristina@whattheartistsays.com

310-427-4754