When the going got tough in New York, Jo Baer got going to Amsterdam and never came back.

Not that any of her contemporaries cared. I mean she was a woman after all.

Jo Baer was born in Seattle, Washington in 1929 to a commercial artist (her mother) and a commodities broker (her father). Baer’s mother was a fierce feminist and always told Jo that she could do anything that she wanted to do, but that she should definitely be a medical illustrator and major in Biology at the University of Washington. This is exactly what Jo did, until she dropped out in her junior year to get married. Classic rebelling against your parents’ beliefs, am I right?

This marriage nor any of Baer’s other marriages ever panned out. Eventually she decided that marital bliss wasn’t in the cards for her and that she should just focus on her art and her son, Joshua, which she still does today without the distraction of silly men. Jo’s mother reacted poorly to this, of course. When Jo decided to be an artist, “She got wild with jealousy and very nasty…She screamed at me, ‘Your child will grow up to be a criminal. And you can’t move to New York; it’s full of Communists.’” Which I suppose is not untrue (the Communist part, not the criminal part.)

Jo can be categorized as a Minimalist but definitely not an Abstract Expressionist. In 1983, Baer wrote an article in Art in America titled "I am no longer an Abstract Artist." And then she moved first to Ireland and then to Amsterdam where she still lives. The reason Jo bailed on New York wasn’t because she wasn’t successful but because all of the men around her were patronizing pieces of poo and she couldn’t take it anymore. Once there she never looked back until she was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Take that stupid boys.