Every Luminous Inch

June 3 - August 28, 2025

Every Luminous Inch: Mixed Media Paintings of Unsung Landscapes by Julie C. Baer, a Cambridge painter and a HGSE Language and Literacy alumna, Ed.M. '09, features a collection of recent mixed-media nature paintings inspired by the artist’s experience looking closely at views of what she calls “unsung landscapes” both in New England and the Pacific Northwest. 

Her work reflects her deeply-felt experience walking in the woods, looking closely and appreciating small-scale native landscapes throughout their seasonal cycles. She tries to capture her first felt glimpse of a scene, with its fluctuating patterns of shifting light, variegated colors, constant movement, and changing forms. Working abstractly, yet botanically accurately, she takes an approach of openness and welcoming to try to see natural things in their beautifully imperfect form. It takes unlearning societal training and shifting from asking, “what is this supposed to look like?” to “what does this really look like?” As such, Baer tries to surprise viewers with unusual views — looking down, looking up, looking up-close — to induce them to look deeply, just as she has done. Many pieces depict the complex design inherent in nature — in the unnoticed biodiverse life forms growing on old trees and rocks and in the mingling of unarranged and constantly changing growth and decay on the forest floor. Other works glimpse moving water through the dead stalks of last year’s riparian plants. Due to heavily collaged mixed-media elements, including painted paper, beads, shells, glass, and stones, the paintings are highly topographic, as though life forms grow directly from their surfaces. Baer’s compositions tend to lack traditional focal points, thus reflecting, as the artist expresses it, “the mobile, momentary, sometimes disorienting way we encounter nature.” Baer explains what drives her: “I am exquisitely aware that, though nature is our collective home, human activity has caused irreparable losses of habitat, resources, and species. y revealing and revering the beauty of humble local biota, I wish to respond to ecologists’ call for native ecosystem rediscovery and restoration. Additionally, science shows correlations between time spent in nature and wellbeing. My work, therefore, reminds viewers to go outdoors and look closely, and in this way, care for themselves and their habitats.”

Julie C. Baer has been painting for over 45 years. As a teenager struggling with undiagnosed PTSD, artmaking was lifesaving for her, providing a calling, a practice, a generativity, an identity. She attended Rhode Island School of Design after high school and graduated from the New School for Social Research in New York City, after which she made art, exhibited full-time, and published two picture books (Love Me Later, Bollix Books 2005 and I Only Like What I Like, Bollix Books 2003) while raising her sons. In 2007, she returned to graduate school for a master’s of education in language and literacy (2009 Harvard Graduate School of Education) and doctor of education in teaching and learning (2018 Northeastern University). Until 2022 she taught academic writing to students of all ages and backgrounds, from incumbent workers at Boston hospitals and nursing students at UMass Boston, to first-year BU students. The pandemic brought her back to art, transformed. In 2024, she served as Visiting Artist at the Native Plant Trust in Massachusetts and her work was featured on the GBH Community Canvas digital mural project. This year, her work was included in the annual juried New England Collective at Galatea Fine Art in SOWA, Boston. She is a member of TAG: The Art Gallery at the New England Art Center in SOWA, Boston, and Atlantic Works Gallery in East Boston. She has exhibited and sold her work widely. View her work on her website and Instagram.