Local painter Rushern Baker IV has finished a new home studio in Riverdale Park joining a growing artist community on the corridor.

As a “lockdown project” over the last year, Baker sketched out the design and worked with an engineer at a shed building company to construct the exterior.

“Luckily, I have a good friend is a contractor,” he told the Hyattsville Wire. “He and I have been chipping away at the interior work as a DIY project a couple days a week.”

The son of the former Prince George’s County executive, Baker moved to Riverdale Park in 2012 because it was centrally located for his and his wife’s jobs and part of the greater Route 1 arts scene, which he was introduced to while serving as an artist in residence at the Gateway Arts Center.

Baker’s paintings go through a multi-stage process, starting as collages in his sketchbook that he scans and reworks in Photoshop. Those images are then printed in grids and wheatpasted onto canvas, where he adds ceramic tile adhesive, plaster, concrete paint and resin to build out the image.

But he may do more than paint in the studio.

“The space is so spacious that seems kinda selfish to just have my own work lying around,” he said. “I’m hoping to do a more public facing opening of the space around the same time as the next Gateway Open Studio tour.”

Apart from his own art, Baker has also managed public arts programs as assistant director of the Brentwood Arts Exchange as well as serving on the board for Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, among other things.

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