James Baker

James Baker served as the Executive Director of Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle and Stanwood, Washington (2010-18), as President of Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine (2006-10), and as Executive Director of Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado (1995-2006).

Baker received his undergraduate degree in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University in 1973 and his Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975.

He served as a tenured Assistant Professor of Art at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and as a tenured Associate Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. In 1986, he accepted the position of Program Director for Photography at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and in 1995 accepted the board’s invitation to serve as Executive Director.

He produced the nationally touring exhibition Photography: The Selected Image with Gerald Lang (1977) and a touring exhibition for the State of Maine, Re-envisioning Portland (2007). At Anderson Ranch Arts Center, he organized regional and national symposia including The Political Landscape with Richard Misrach (1989), Art into Action: Public Art for People with Arlene Raven (1994), and High Tech/High Touch with Barbara Bloemink (2005).

His photographs have been shown nationally in solo and group exhibitions and are represented in private and museum collections. He received a Colorado Individual Artist’s Fellowship (1988) and later served as a juror for the Colorado Council on the Arts. He has also served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts and written on the arts for publications including Outside Magazine, Glass: the UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, and as a Contributing Editor for Aspen Magazine. He hosted a weekly radio program interviewing visual artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers on Central Colorado’s regional NPR station KAJX (1995-2006).
Nationally, Baker has served on the boards of the Alliance of Artists Communities (chair 2004-05) and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design.