Allison Baker

Website:

https://www.allisonbaker.com

Campus:

IU Indianapolis

Allison Baker is an associate professor of fine art (sculpture) in the Herron School of Art + Design at Indiana University Indianapolis.  Allison is a first-generation college student that earned her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. 

With the support of the Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Professor Baker is developing a new body of work that examines late-stage capitalism and working-class politics. This series draws from the imagery of Spomenik and other post-World War II monuments in Eastern Europe. She references these sites as she believes Americans often struggle with self-examination. These monuments serve  as mirrors, reflecting the realities of our own society, particularly the deeply entrenched class stratification that we fail to fully acknowledge. While Americans readily conceptualize the idea that, under socialism and communism,  people often die in the same class they were born into, they tend to overlook the similar barriers to class mobility that exist in late-stage capitalism. The notion of "rugged individualism," combined with the fallacy of the meritocracy and the myth of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps," perpetuates the false promise of the American Dream—a narrative that implies anyone can achieve rags-to-riches success through hard work. Baker's work interrogates this myth by confronting the realities of class immobility in our society.

The Spomenik hold particular interest for Professor Baker, not only because of their striking concrete construction, a material she has used in her own sculptures for years, but also because of their aesthetic and conceptual implications. Concrete, as a low-cost material, is tied to blue-collar labor and urban environments, particularly affordable housing. Intellectually, she is drawn to the cultural moment in which Yugoslavian architecture diverged from Soviet Communist Realism and rejected American abstraction in the 1960s, creating a distinct socialist aesthetic that reflects a rejection of dominant narratives from both the East and the West.

She engages with the idea, proposed by James E Young, that all monuments possess “fascist tendencies” as they aim to shape collective memory, guide public perception and reinforce state power. Through her work, Baker seeks to queer this notion by repurposing monuments traditionally associated with state-sponsored propaganda to offer a critique of late-stage capitalism and its social and political failures. 

As someone from a working-class background, Baker is navigating the tension between identifying objects tied to class and portraying them with care and tenderness. She is drawn to symbols of working-class life such as window air conditioners, lottery tickets, and the "sins of despair" like smoking and drinking. It is important to her that these elements are approached without judgment,  acknowledging the social and cultural attachments that come with them. 

In re-imagining these monuments through the lens of American working-class life, Baker wrestles with her own story. While she may be seen as a success of meritocracy, having transcended the class she was raised in, she is acutely aware of how much luck played a role in that journey—how, in some ways, she won a personal lottery. Her work is an attempt to grapple with these contradictions and to honor the complexities of class, labor, and social mobility in America.