Mara Baldwin is stepping down as director of the Handwerker Gallery at the end of May. Mara has led the gallery since 2011. She has been a creative, energetic gallery director who has pushed the Handwerker's exhibitions and programming towards emerging art practices and has taken a special interest in using the gallery to explore ideas about politics, gender, race, and sexuality. She also undertook a long-term transformation of the physical gallery space, installing a new floor, building movable walls, and updating lighting, furniture, and fixtures.
She was unafraid of exhibiting provocative artwork and tackling challenging installations. Over the years, she's worked with staff and students to, among other things, build bathroom stalls, nail a mind-boggling number of individual feathers into a wall, and hang thousands of images and artifacts of #WhitePeopleDoingYoga in the gallery. She has been a generous colleague and a tireless advocate for the visual arts on campus.
Through it all, she maintained her own art making practice and has been awarded many residencies and invitations to exhibit her work.
She has accepted a position teaching Art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York starting this fall. She's looking forward to spending more time making art.