Nancy Baker Cahill

Baker Cahill was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and grew up in Boston. She received a BA in art from Williams College in 1992. Baker Cahill has exhibited extended reality works at the 2019 Desert X Biennial, Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, Francisco Carolinum (Linz) and Kunsthalle Zürich. She was included in the public projects Sunset Digital Billboards (2018) and "Luminex: Dialogues of Light" (2021), an exhibition of digital projections mapped onto Los Angeles buildings. She has had featured exhibitions at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Boston Cyberarts, the LUMA Foundation Elevation 1049 Biennial, and the Georgia Museum of Art (her first retrospective, "Through Lines," 2023). In 2018, Baker Cahill founded 4th Wall, a free AR application 4th Wall provides a platform through which artists can exhibit virtual works to a wider audience and intervene in specific, outdoor public spaces through a geo-location feature. ==Work==

Baker Cahill's early work centered on works on paper and videos that explored physical embodiment in an increasingly immersive manner. In her later extended reality works, she often digitally transforms hand-drawn works on paper into sculptural, hybrid objects and moving animations that can be reinserted into the world as videos, prints, or illuminated projections. In various series, she experimented with drawings that transitioned into three-dimensional space, by shooting them with bullets, puncturing them with a leather puncher or collaging shrapnel-like slivers onto them. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described the latter work as a haunting, "twirling, swirling fog of phantasmagorical shards of light and shadow hovering in the sky" that evoked a star being born from a cloud of dust, a plague of locusts, or a thought forming. In its first two versions, a fiery, cataclysmic mushroom cloud swells and explodes over the ocean before transforming into a crackling web of lacy, lilac arterial threads—more hopeful, interconnected forms that suggested digital webs and mycelial (fungal) networks. Liberty Bell On July 4, 2020, Baker Cahill presented Liberty Bell, six public site-specific animated artworks commissioned by Art Production Fund that appeared in culturally significant sites across the Eastern United States: the Boston Tea Party harbor; the Washington Monument; the "Rocky Steps" in Philadelphia; the Fort Tilden Army installation; Fort Sumter; and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The animation depicted a floating, shape-shifting coil of red, white and blue brushstrokes roughly approximating a swaying, abstracted Liberty Bell—accompanied by a raucous soundtrack—which built toward arrhythmic dissolution but retained cohesion. Artillery wrote that the "writhing, seething mess of threads" and tolling bell "embodies the turbulent political discourse of an election year and the fraying state of American democracy." Later in the year, she presented the AR work Cento at the Whitney Museum, a fictitious hybrid creature. Participants could use an app to collectively transform it by adding feathers that enabled new adaptive skills. ==NFT and blockchain projects==

In 2021, Baker Cahill began working with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and blockchain technology, as in the work Slipstream 001 (2021), for which she used torn graphite paper to create a sculpture that was transmuted into a 3D object and filmed so that it moved in a slow semi-circle before viewers. Charlotte Kent of The Brooklyn Rail described the multi-layered piece as a "simple yet disconcerting breakdown and reconfiguration of a 'real' sculpture." Baker Cahill collaboratively developed Contract Killers—an NFT project critiquing smart contracts, accountability and the yet-unrealized promise of equity in the blockchain space—with art lawyer Sarah Conley Odenkirk, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, and Snark.art. It consisted of four separate AR renderings of a handshake dissipating into a swirl of pixels in front of selected charged environments (e.g., Los Angeles City Hall, the Hall of Justice) in order to represent a state of failed social trust and obligation. ==Curatorial and collaborative projects==

Baker Cahill's collaborative projects have examined social issues, often using 4th Wall to virtually locate works at contested sites, enabling critical commentary while skirting issues of permission. "Defining Line" was an extension of that project that activated untold sites of historical significance along the Los Angeles River involving urban redevelopment, the environment, Native histories and patterns of gentrification. ==Recognition==

Baker Cahill's work belongs to the collections of the Whitney Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and Lancaster Museum of Art and History, among others. In 2022, she received a LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant and a COLA (City of Los Angeles) Master Artist Fellowship. She was an artist fellow at the Occidental College Oxy Arts' Encoding Futures program (2021), a Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor recipient (2021), and one of ten Berggruen Institute inaugural artist fellows in its Transformations of the Human program (2020). In 2012, she received an ARC Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation. In 2024, the Whitney Museum selected Baker Cahill to give its annual Walter Annenberg Lecture. == References ==