STATEMENT

Allison Baker's sculptures examine the tangled politics of class, labor, and embodiment—usually by poking directly at the myths America prefers to keep polished and out of view. Trained in gender studies and human sexuality, and raised within the working-class realities she interrogates, Baker approaches material not as metaphor but as lived infrastructure. Concrete, bronze, clearance-rack textiles, beer cans, lottery tickets: in her hands, each becomes evidence in a long-running case study on how systems shape people, and how people stubbornly persist anyway.

Her early work deployed the abject, the domestic, and a distinctly serrated sense of humor to critique the pink-collar labor and fantasy-soaked aesthetics of American womanhood. Those flaccid, overgrown soft sculptures—equal parts punchline and indictment—mapped the emotional and physical exhaustion built into care, cleaning, and the endless second shift.

Baker’s current practice scales up the interrogation, turning to industrial materials and the architectural language of monuments. Drawing from postwar Spomenik forms, she queers the monument away from state power and toward the people it routinely overlooks. In bronzing the discarded—cheap cigarettes, low-cost food, the artifacts of survival—she honors working-class life with tenderness rather than the usual judgment. The result is a body of work that refuses the patriotic fiction of meritocracy and class mobility, opting instead for honest, unflinching memorials to the everyday labor that actually keeps America standing.

Across both domestic absurdities and monumental critique, Baker’s through line remains clear: she exposes the structures that script our lives, and then—dryly, sharply—shows us what they cost.