Erica Baum

Erica Baum was born in New York in 1961 and received a BA in anthropology from Barnard College, New York, in 1984; an MA in TESOL/applied linguistics from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1988; and an MFA in photography from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1994. Baum takes the printed page as her primary subject, photographing fragments of found language at close range. Commingling image and text, her works often operate simultaneously as both photograph and poem.

In her early series Blackboards (1994–96), Baum took photographs of the smudges, partial erasures, and stray marks left on chalkboards. The close-up, cropped format of these images and their focus on inscribed communication remain signature aspects of her work. Soon after, Baum turned her attention to various forms of found language. She started photographing the interiors of library card catalogue drawers in 1996, highlighting humorous or poignant juxtapositions of research topics that arose from the coincidence of alphabetical proximity. A similar instinct guides the Index series, begun in 1999, which features photocopied combinations of select terms and their subcategories as found in the indices of various books. Largely decontextualized, the words and their corresponding page numbers are transformed from a utilitarian reference to compact, suggestive poetry. For the Naked Eye series (2008– ), Baum directs her camera into the partially opened pages of stipple-edged paperbacks from the 1960s and ’70s, capturing slivers of image and text separated by the vertical striations of adjacent pages’ brightly dyed edges. Although the compositions are each the result of a single, unaltered photograph, they operate visually as collages and veer toward abstraction. In the series Newspaper Clippings (2010– ), the decontextualized lines of text and color that comprise these works are culled from the New York Times. The artist combines these appropriated snippets by layering horizontal strips of newsprint into compositions of spare poetry that reflect the tenor of our current moment.

Baum’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Langenhagen, Germany (2013), and numerous galleries. Group presentations include Foul Play, Thread Waxing Space, New York (1999); Subject Index, Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden (2008); The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo Biennial (2012); Athens Biennial (2013); Reloaded: Concrete Trends, Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2015); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015), among others. Baum lives and works in New York.