Joell Baxter

Joell Baxter: Mysteries of the Grid

Joell Baxter is a Brooklyn-based sculptor and printmaker who was born in Washington D.C. and raised in Evanston, Illinois. She received a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2000.

 Baxter’s unusual approach — combining sculpture, arts and crafts, drawing, and design — uses cyclic systems of color and form to explore the relationship between object and illusion. Her sculptural work utilizes printed or drawn sheets, strips or pieces to create layered, woven or other three-dimensional works. In this way, she is able to achieve open, lacy or plaited forms that work off the floor, the wall or corners of her installations. Baxter creates textile-like, forms that often resemble Op-art and explore subtle chromatic shifts and hatchings, bright offsets, or refreshing pastel combinations. 

“Joell Baxter engages weaving fully,” wrote the artist Joanne Mattera.⁵ “Working chromatically with papers she has screenprinted on both sides, she creates woven forms that are set onto the floor...Viewing these works, which Baxter sees as hovering between object and image, it is not difficult to make the conceptual leap from basketry to architecture, one grid to another.” 

Baxter, according to Mattera, said she was “attracted to the idea of building a structure from the simplest parts possible, using the simplest process possible.” As a result, Baxter has printed, cut and woven strips of color into forms. However, in her recent small edition of screenprints, Baxter invented a woven surface directly on the paper’s surface by overlaying screens of basic, clear colors. Then, shifting one screen darker and one lighter, she created darkened and pastel versions of the same image. Baxter’s prints, therefore, are conceptual and visual explorations of the work she has been physically carrying out.

-Excerpt from Editions '13 by Debora Cullen