Hilary Baker received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from the Otis Art Institute. A Los Angeles native, she spent her childhood roaming the hills around her home in the canyons, hunting for animal bones and avoiding the occasional snake. Her subjects, ranging from baseball and wildlife to California’s history and landscape, are depicted in her signature graphic style. Known for paintings that hint at anxiety and mordant wit with unblinking clarity, Baker’s world is quarried from the strange, poetic, and darkly humorous. She has been awarded residencies at the Pont-Aven School of Art in France, the Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, Yaddo and MacDowell. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, the Crocker Museum, Broad Art Foundation, Temple University, and the University of Southern California, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, L.A.Weekly, Art and Cake, Artillery and New American Paintings. As a curator, she co-organized the exhibitions, Blind Courier: 9 Artists and Their Notions of Place (2019) and Sexy: Sensual Abstraction in California, 1950’s -1990’s (1996). Exhibiting throughout the United States and internationally, a survey of her her work was presented at the University of La Verne (2016), in two Los Angeles solo exhibitions at rory devine fine art (2021 and 2023), and solo exhibitions at the Wildling Museum of Art and Nature (2022) Vita (2023) and the High Desert Museum (2024). She lives and works in Ojai, California, in the shadow of the Toptopa mountains.