Jennifer Baahng Gallery

Jennifer Baahng Gallery JENNIFER BAAHNG GALLERY is a contemporary art gallery in New York.

JENNIFER BAAHNG presents an online selection from R.C. Baker’s ongoing “Head Shop Tondos” series. Blending Renaissance s...
06/11/2026

JENNIFER BAAHNG presents an online selection from R.C. Baker’s ongoing “Head Shop Tondos” series. Blending Renaissance sfumato with the raw innovation of David Smith’s spray-enamel paintings, the series also channels the bold, confrontational energy of 1960s album and poster design, alongside a darker undercurrent drawn from the “It Can’t Happen Here” strain within the American Dream. In these works, high and low collide and dissolve, opening a space where history, media, and memory blur into one another. Also visible online are Baker’s two solo exhibitions, “Noise for Signal” (2018), a mural-scale installation of approximately 3,600 “degeneration prints,” along with posters and assemblages. These are thumbnail reproductions of head-shop posters advertised in early-1970s comic books, distorted by cheap printing techniques. Baker’s process pushes these flaws over the border between recognizable imagery and abstraction, revealing the towering ideals of the ’60s as battered and degraded, yet still beautiful. His first solo exhibition, in 2009, “…and Nixon’s coming”|the draft, combines art, fiction, and design to create a multifaceted narrative that arcs from the Moscow show trials of 1937 to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974. The work views the turbulent artistic and social ferment of the mid-20th century through the experiences of the story’s main character, Kirby Holland, and through his artwork, including academic drawings and studies after the old masters, comic-book illustrations, and amalgams of Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and graphics. Whether figurative or abstract, none of the art functions as illustration; rather, the images create a parallel track to the text.

IMAGES
Scorpio Falling (Head Shop (X), 2026, reverse spray painting on a clear acrylic disc, 28.875-inch diameter.
In Every Concept a Heartache (Head Shop III), 2024, reverse spray painting on a clear acrylic disc, 35.875-inch diameter.
Memo to Pherber (Head Shop V), 2025, reverse spray painting on a clear acrylic disc, 35.875-inch diameter.

JENNIFER BAAHNG’s curatorial initiative WE ARE THE LAND presents FORBIDDEN FRUITS, on view through June 30, 2026. The on...
05/22/2026

JENNIFER BAAHNG’s curatorial initiative WE ARE THE LAND presents FORBIDDEN FRUITS, on view through June 30, 2026. The online exhibition examines the relationship between human actions and the environment through Yang SoonYeal’s burnt apples collected after the 2025 wildfires in South Korea. It illustrates ecological and domestic destruction, revealing how human actions scar the land.

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Drawing on Joseph Beuys’ 1970s concept of “social sculpture,” FORBIDDEN FRUITS proposes that society itself is a collective artwork shaped by individuals’ creativity, actions, and thoughts. “Everyone is an artist” in structuring society, fostering dialogue, and enacting social change. Showcasing charred apples as art shifts the focus from the aesthetic perfection of traditional fruit paintings to the messy, often overlooked processes of change and loss. FORBIDDEN FRUITS is a living sculpture, a Gesamtkunstwerk that focuses on transformation, transience, and the imperfections of reality.

Extending this trajectory into contemporary eco-discourse, introducing FORBIDDEN FRUITS into Land Art offers a profound thermodynamic critique of the Anthropocene, staging an intellectual convergence among history, culture, and the physics of ecological ruin. By subjecting the apple to the entropic violence of fire, Land artists perform a literal and symbolic decolonization of the landscape. The blackened apples function as a site-specific archive of pyrocene trauma, in which the orchard’s domestic comforts are violently reclaimed by elemental, unruly natural forces. Structured within the landscape, these carbonized spheres evoke the geological minimalism of Robert Smithson and the ephemeral cyclicality of Andy Goldsworthy, serving as a visceral “memento mori.” This practice establishes a compelling material dialectic: the scorched apple is both a relic of total destruction and an essential biological nutrient that fuels future micro-ecosystems.

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INDETERMINACYJohn Cage: Works on Paperthrough April 22, 2026For more Information, contact us at INQUIRIES@BAAHNG.COMINDE...
03/25/2026

INDETERMINACY
John Cage: Works on Paper
through April 22, 2026

For more Information, contact us at [email protected]

INDETERMINACY features a carefully curated selection of John Cage's most influential works on paper. The exhibition examines Cage's intentional, unbiased approach to removing personal bias from the creative process. The theme of silence, represented in INDETERMINACY, is expressed through visual works that encompass a wide range of philosophical perspectives.

John Cage's engagement with Gertrude Stein's work spanned his entire career, beginning with his early musical settings of her poems in the 1930s and evolving into a philosophical connection to her ‘landscape’ approach to language. He believed that meaning was flexible and that words were often used beyond their usual senses. This view created a surface of sound and text characterized by a non-hierarchical structure. Immediate perception, similar to Stein's ‘continuous present,’ aimed to immerse the audience in the world as it is and eliminate symbolic baggage from art.

While John Cage used the term to describe his 1959 collection of 90 stories, "indeterminacy" is a fundamental aspect of his visual art practice. Cage's works on paper function as musical scores with graphic notation. These scores are indeterminate in performance and open to multiple interpretations. In this
exhibition, chance refers to the random methods employed in composition, and indeterminacy emphasizes the open-ended nature of the final work. By removing the self from the center of the artwork, John Cage encourages us to view the paper as a window into a constantly changing yet still present world. INDETERMINACY closely aligns with his intent, as the works rely on chance to shape their unconstrained final form.

IMAGE:
John Cage, Where There Is Where There Urban Landscape 31, 1987-89, a series of 48 unique color aquatints with flat bite etching, 22.75 × 30 in.

JENNIFER BAAHNG celebrates major milestones in 2025, showcasing its artists Jaye Moon and Sue McNally. Jaye Moon’s innov...
12/10/2025

JENNIFER BAAHNG celebrates major milestones in 2025, showcasing its artists Jaye Moon and Sue McNally. Jaye Moon’s innovative practices and Sue McNally’s landscapes have gained national recognition and captivated audiences in New York and beyond.

Sue McNally continues to impress in the contemporary art scene with her landscape series, showcased in solo and group exhibitions that highlight the enduring power of painting: at the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park, August 16-October 27, 2025; THE AUDACITY OF PAINT at the Maier Museum of Art, Oct 19, 2025-Mar 8, 2026; and in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Evergreen Review’s Certenza.

Jaye Moon was inducted into the 2025 NYFA Hall of Fame at the New York Foundation for the Arts. As an NYFA Fellow in sculpture since 2009, she was honored for her innovative, accessible art. The Fall 2025 issue of Prattfolio, the magazine of Pratt Institute (where she earned her MFA), featured an interview titled “Bridging Touch and Vision, Brick by Brick.” Moon discusses her experience as an immigrant artist, her vibrant sculptural works that break down barriers, and how receiving a NYFA grant affirmed her creative vision.


IAN GANASSI (1955 - 2025)It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Ian Ganassi, on December 7, 2025. Ganas...
12/10/2025

IAN GANASSI (1955 - 2025)

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Ian Ganassi, on December 7, 2025. Ganassi, a poet and artist, is represented by Jennifer Baahng Gallery with the collage collaboration “The Corpses.” He and his partner in the long-running project, painter Laura Bell, first exhibited with the gallery in 2009 in the group show “Disciplined Spontaneity,” which also featured antecedents such as John Cage. A major survey of more than 200 collages, dating from 2005 to 2024, was showcased by the gallery last year.

Ian Ganassi worked as a writer, teacher, and percussionist. His poems appeared in many literary magazines, including the Yale Review and New American Writing; his poem “Blunt Trauma” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and his translations from Virgil’s Aeneid appeared in the New England Review. Ian’s first poetry collection, “Mean Numbers,” was published in 2016; his second collection, “True for the Moment,” in 2023; and his third, “By This Time,” in 2024.

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