Rushern Baker IV
Rushern "Rush" Baker IV (born September 10, 1987) is an American painter and past candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates to represent District 22 in Prince George's County.
Early life and education
Baker was born in Washington, DC on September 10, 1987 to Prince George's County Executive Rushern L. Baker, III and the former Christa Beverly. When he was four years old, his family moved to Cheverly, Maryland. Baker attended Prince George's County public schools and graduated from Suitland High School in Forestville, Maryland. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cooper Union in 2009 and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting/printmaking from Yale University in 2012, where he was awarded the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award for outstanding achievement in drawing or painting from nature.
Career
After graduating from Yale, Baker moved back to Prince George's County. He is a self-employed artist whose work is greatly influenced by politics, and have been described as being "heavily influenced by author Octavia Butler’s Afrofuturist novels, most notably Parable of the Sower." In a 2013 interview, he said “I want my paintings to generate a discourse around policy, especially foreign policy." Baker's work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in Maryland, DC, New York, Connecticut, California, North Carolina, Dubai, and *an, and is currently a lecturer at the University of Maryland on drawing and two-dimensional design. Baker previously coordinated a publicly funded mobile arts program for youth. He is a former artist-in-residence at 39th Street Gallery, a part of The Gateway Arts Center in Brentwood, Maryland.
In discussing his most recent exhibition in 2019 at Washington, DC's Hemphill Fine Arts, the reviewing art critic *erted that "Baker’s energetic and frenetic abstractions invoke a range of concerns, from the perils of living while black and the widening income gap to the proliferation of alternative facts and weaponized technology."