Carrie Ann Baade’s oil paintings dialog with the past through complex iconography and imagery that quote from Renaissance and Baroque canvases. She constructs layered narratives that resemble fantastical parables as her compositions interlace the strange beauty in the unexpected, the uncanny, the disregarded, and the unconventional. Her work rejects a rational vision of life in favor of one that asserts the value of the subconscious. Her compositions, feminist and autobiographical, weave personal and classical symbology into narratives on mortality, sexuality, personal transformation, and the darker side of human nature.
Born 1974 in Louisiana, Baade received her MFA from University of Delaware in 2003 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997, and she studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy in 1995-96. Her awards include the Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship for Established Artist in Painting (2005–2006), a nomination for the United States Art Award (2007), the Florida State Division of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Fellowship (2009–2010) and a nomination for the, Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2012 and 2022). Over the past 25 years, she has shown in over 200 exhibitions and 25 solo exhibitions. Her work has been shown at: the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Mesa Contemporary Museum of Art, the Pensacola Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, the Delaware Contemporary, Billy Shire Fine Arts and La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles, the Harwood Museum in Taos, the Warsaw Cultural Center, the Instituto de America de Santa Fe in Granada, Spain; and the Ningbo Art Museum in China. Raised on the front range in Colorado, she lives and works in Northern Florida, where she is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Florida State University.