John Baeder

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition, John Baeder: American Roadside. This solo exhibition, opening March 16, 2020 and continuing through April 24, 2020, will present the artist's large-scale color photographs of uniquely American forms of roadside architecture. 

John Baeder is one of the most prominent of the Photo-realists and is mainly known for his depictions of diners and American roadside culture. Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1938, he grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. In the late 1960s, Baeder started collecting postcards and photographs of urban architecture, developing a sensitivity for the beauty and value found in this enduring iconography. 

John Baeder often photographed the places he wished to paint and used these images to compose his paintings. "There are some photographs that scream to be paintings, and some that just want to be photographs.", states Baeder.

Paintings and photographs by Baeder are included in the following collections: Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In 2009, Baeder received the Tennessee Governor's Distinguished Artist Award, and his work has helped make the diner an American icon; his art serves as an aesthetic record of the quickly disappearing American roadside culture that so engaged him.

Books include Diners (1978), Gas, Food, Lodging (1984), Diners (revised edition, 1995), Sign Language (1996), John Baeder's American Roadside (2009), and John Baeder's Road Well Taken (2015). A documentary film, Baeder: Pleasant Journeys and Good Eats Along the Way was produced in conjunction with the Morris Museum of Art, and traces the artist trajectory from the earliest postcard paintings to the more recent roadside images.

To request further information or high-resolution images, please contact Joseph Bellows Gallery at info@josephbellows.com. Established in 1998, Joseph Bellows Gallery features rotating exhibitions of both historical and contemporary photography, with a particular interest in American work from the 1970s. For more information: www.josephbellows.com