Biography

Carrie Ann Baade (b. 1974, Louisiana) is an American painter whose work reimagines the visual language of art history through allegory, fragmentation, and speculative narrative. Drawing from Renaissance and Baroque painting, mythology, literature, feminist critique, psychology, and personal history, she creates intricate symbolic worlds where historical archetypes, cultural memory, and contemporary consciousness collide. Her paintings function as psychological theaters, exploring transformation, mortality, desire, inherited narratives, and the unstable boundaries between beauty and grotesquerie.

Working across oil painting, egg tempera, gilding, pastiglia, collage, and mixed media, Baade engages historical techniques not as acts of nostalgia, but as living tools for contemporary inquiry. Her recent work expands into speculative portraiture, archival intervention, and materially layered constructions that recover obscured histories, particularly those of women erased or marginalized within dominant historical narratives.

Born in Louisiana and raised on the Front Range of Colorado, Baade earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied Renaissance and Baroque painting techniques at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, and received her MFA from the University of Delaware. Since 2007, she has served as Professor of Painting at Florida State University, where she teaches painting, historical techniques, and contemporary studio practice.

Baade has presented more than 25 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 250 exhibitions internationally, with work shown throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Mexico, including Art Capital at the Grand Palais in Paris, the LA Art Show, the San Francisco Art Fair, the Leonora Carrington Museum, and museums across the United States and abroad. Her work has been featured in Forbes, Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, American Art Collector, Beautiful Bizarre, and numerous international publications.

Her honors include the Halo Fellowship Award, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Fellowship, the Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellowship, and a 2026 residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Her recent body of work, Birthplace: Reimagining Colonial Louisiana Women through Portraiture, combines archival research, collage, and speculative portraiture to recover obscured ancestral narratives shaped by colonialism, migration, and cultural erasure. Through this work, Baade engages painting as both an imaginative and reparative act.

Her monograph, Scissors and Tears (La Luz de Jesus Press, 2022), surveys two decades of symbolic and narrative work, tracing her ongoing commitment to technical rigor, imaginative inquiry, and the reinvention of painting as a site of psychological, historical, and cultural excavation.