Fine Design: A Studio Guide to Remixing Design, Art, Craft, and Industry. Scott Klinker, foreword by Andrew Satake Blauvelt. Set Margins’, 2026. 264 pages, 170 × 240 mm, Otabind softcover, first printing of 3,000. Designed with Ed Ryan / I-R-I-S.

Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US. Andrew Satake Blauvelt and Bridget Bartal. Phaidon, 2025. 464 pages, 290 × 250 mm, hardback. Designed with Andrew Blauvelt and Ed Ryan.

To Be a Garden: Photographs from a Year Believing in Rogue Landscaping Practices. Arno Goetz, guest essay by Cooper Holoweski. Cranbrook Art Library, 2024.

Bill Saylor: Snow Paintings. Bill Saylor. Junior Publishing, 2024. 92 pages.

Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit. Edited by Laura Mott, Mario Moore and Andrew Ruys de Perez. Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2023. 118 pages, 26 cm, softcover, colour throughout.

Evan Mazellan. Evan Mazellan, Cranbrook Academy of Art MFA statement. Self-published, 2024. 146 pages, 8 × 12 in, edition of 25. Cover screen printed by Kayrock Screenprinting, interior printed and bound by Conveyor Studio.

Fountainswimming, Cranbrook’s student journal. Two issues: Issue 01 — Archive (2022), in blue with copper foil, and the 2023 issue, in bright blue, photographed in water. Inked with the help of William Lanzillo.

Entanglements: 15 Years of Cranbrook Fiber. Mark Newport, artist-in-residence. Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2023. 127 pages, 4.25 × 6 in, cloth-bound in three colours. Designed with Ed Ryan.

Marion Hayden: Daughter of the Way. Nichole Christian, photographs by Cybelle Codish. The Kresge Foundation, 2025. 2025 Kresge Eminent Artist monograph.

Dot Jackson. Dot Jackson, MFA statement. Self-published, 2023. 100 pages, 8 × 12 in, pink cloth with a gold-stamped title. Printed and bound by Conveyor Studio.

Graduate Degree Exhibition. Catalogue for Cranbrook Academy of Art’s class of 2023, with the exhibition identity and the class website. Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2023.

Labyrinth/Laboratory: Selections from the Cranbrook Collection. Work by Cranbrook Academy of Art alumni and faculty, drawn from a collection of more than 8,000 objects and hung so that pieces from different decades talk to each other. Eliel Saarinen’s interlocking motif stands for the Academy itself: a labyrinth each student makes, and a laboratory that never closes. Curated by Kat Goffnett and Katy Kim. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. From April 2026.

Haas Brothers: Uncanny Valley. The first mid-career survey of the twins Nikolai and Simon Haas, whose Los Angeles studio mixes art, craft, design and technology into fictional creatures and otherworldly places they call “problem-solving fantasies.” Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. November 2025 – February 2026.

Designing Cranbrook: The Saarinens’ Eclectic Vision. How Eliel Saarinen and his family shaped the Cranbrook campus between 1925 and 1942, from Saarinen House to Kingswood School and the Institute of Science, each in its own style. Curated by Bridget Bartal. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. Ongoing, Lower Galleries.

Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US. About 200 works by nearly 100 designers, architects and artists, with Cranbrook at the centre and the women, LGBTQ+ designers and designers of color of the period given their due. The title is Charles Eames’s. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. June – September 2025.

Monumental Color: Cecily Brown, Sam Gilliam, and Joan Mitchell. Three large abstract paintings from the museum’s collection and the Masterworks Foundation, Mitchell’s Preface for Chris, Gilliam’s Found Touch and Brown’s The Hunt, hung together in the Larson Gallery. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. June – September 2026.

Pop Art Pop-Up. Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Johns, Dine and Oldenburg from the permanent collection, with the artists and designers who came after them, from Ed Rossbach and Keith Haring to KAWS. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. February – March 2025.

Scott Hocking: Detroit Stories. The first museum retrospective of the Detroit artist, known for sculptures built alone inside abandoned buildings and seen mostly through his photographs of them, and for Detroit Nights, made only by available light. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. November 2022 – March 2023.

Carl Toth: Reordering Fictions. Forty years of work by the photographer who led Cranbrook’s photography department from 1972 to 2007, from black-and-white prints to SX-70 Polaroids, photocopier collage and photomontage. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. October 2023 – February 2024.

Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit. Detroit painters and draftspeople picturing Black life in its range, joy, intimacy, reverie and tension, with their craft framed as skilled labor in a city built on it. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. October 2023 – March 2024.

James Benjamin Franklin: Full Circle. Paintings on irregular, organic canvases and found textiles, crochet afghans, towels and carpet offcuts, that sit somewhere between painting and sculpture. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. November 2022 – March 2023.

Cuba Dispersa (Cuba Dispersed). Six new commissions by Cuban artists and designers living outside Cuba, looking at design and material history under censorship. Part of A Modernist Regime: The Contemporary Cuban Lens. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. July – September 2024.

A Modernist Regime: Cuban Mid-Century Design. The first museum exhibition of Cuban mid-century design, drawn from a furniture collection that had never left the island: Clara Porset, Dujo, EMPROVA, OSPAAAL posters and postrevolutionary architecture. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. July – September 2024.

Marco Castillo: The Hands of the Collector. The former Los Carpinteros member uses the language of Cuban modernism, and the names of forgotten Cuban designers, to protest the state’s repression of artists. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. July – September 2024.

Mythic Chaos: 50 Years of Destroy All Monsters. The Ann Arbor collective and band founded in 1974 by Cary Loren, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw and Niagara, told through posters, zines, photographs, films and a new version of their blob sculpture. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. November 2025 – March 2026.

Akea Brionne: A Dreaming Hour. The Detroit artist’s first solo museum show: large woven tapestries, embellished with glitter, oil pastel and rhinestones, of Afrosurreal worlds centred on a mythical forest. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. June – September 2026.

Drawing in Thread: Olga de Amaral and Anne Wilson. Two former Cranbrook Fiber students on thread and architectural form, with the debut of five of Amaral’s Brumas and Wilson’s Portable City series. Exhibition graphics for Cranbrook Art Museum: title wall, wall texts and labels. June – September 2026.

Jane Lackey and Mark Newport: Correspondence. Catalogue for the exhibition at MATΣRIA, Detroit, June 24 – August 12, 2023. Cranbrook Art Library, 2023. Softcover with a fold-over envelope flap.

Design Within Reach card deck. Design Within Reach, Birmingham, Michigan, 2025. 36 cards in a printed case, edition of 2,500, made for the store’s grand opening.

Eventually Everything Connects poster. A poster for the Cranbrook Art Museum exhibition of mid-century modern design, designed and then screen printed by hand, with production supported by Acid Free and MillerKnoll. 2025.

Campus Walking Map. A map of the Cranbrook campus for visitors to Cranbrook Art Museum, with gallery hours, the sculpture and architecture to find along the way, and a key. Made with Ed Ryan. 2023.

Josh Welker posters. The poster for his exhibition Emptiness of a Certain Kind at Mercury Project, and a small map for a show organized by Bruce Buescher, printed by Sybil Press.

Eight posters for Michael Candy’s devices. Risograph. 11 × 17 in. 2023.

Fountainswimming posters. Posters for Cranbrook’s student journal, printed in an edition of 36 with metallic and black ink.

History of American Architecture. Poster for the Frank Lloyd Wright lecture in the Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research series, in two colorways.

CAA 2D Pizza Party. Poster for the 2D Design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, 2022.

Josh Welker. joshwelker.com, a website for the artist Joshua Grant Welker, a long-time collaborator: the work in a single long scroll, with a vertical strip of his letterforms down the side.

Buffalo Prescott. Identity, website and graphic toolkit for a new art and community space in Detroit, built around a custom stencil typeface: the logo, signage, merchandise, posters, social media templates and printed guides such as the Detroit Art Guide.

Mouse Gallery. Identity, website and graphic toolkit for Mouse, a basement gallery in an old house in Detroit. The o in the wordmark is a dot, and the dots wander across posters, cards and the website; a set of colour pairs, merchandise and printed matter complete the system.

4x4. 4 b time saurs, m 5 weed can, c x water cloud. Three paintings, each 16 × 16 in. 2025.

Clypsohydra. Painting.

Four paintings with Josh Welker. Diagrams GCPY, KGIX and AHRN. 25 × 35 in. Oil on panel.

Scumble, Sunset and Mirror. Three paintings, each 32 × 24 in. Oil on upholstery.

Clocks, noon and midnight. Acrylic on MDF. 12 in.

Facebook. A web collage of the people, places, music and ideas that shaped the work, with every link live.

Letters from a workshop at Keystone School in San Antonio, Texas, made during a residency at Parts and Labor. Every letter of the alphabet, drawn and coloured by hand. 2025.

Type studies. Alphabets drawn from scratch: a faceted blackletter, a hairline display face, a jagged cut-paper set, a single unbroken script line, and an alphabet in which every letter follows its own rule, a star, a coil, a zigzag, a chain, shown in colour and set as text and pattern.

Numbers. Doubled numerals drawn for the 2023 Cranbrook website.

ABOUT

Chris Baker is a graphic designer, artist and teacher who works primarily in art and culture spaces. He works between analog and digital mediums, from painting, printmaking and book binding to digital tools like the Adobe Suite, Figma and other code-based applications, to create work that spans the spectrum of art and design. This manifests in everything from modular painting practices to brand systems and publications. Notable work includes an internationally distributed publication about Mid-Century Modern furniture in Michigan, and print work that has been collected by the MillerKnoll and Eames Office Archives. He has been a visitor at universities including Western Michigan, Wayne State, Lawrence Technological University, Taylor University, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

He graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art with an MFA in 2D Design and currently teaches at Hope College in Holland, MI. He has recently been awarded by GDUSA and the Society of Typographic Arts, and completed an artist residency at Parts and Labor in San Antonio, TX.

CONTACT

chris@cbharkiesr.com
724.506.0220
instagram

© 2026

EDUCATION

  • 23Cranbrook Academy of Art
    Masters of Fine Art, 2D Design
  • 22Index Space
    Intermediate Coding: Computational Design
  • 13Taylor University
    Bachelor of Arts, Graphic Design

EXHIBITIONS

  • 24Never Odd or Even
    Mouse Gallery, Detroit, MI
  • 23Graduate Degree Exhibition
    Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 23Chris Baker and Mason Goolsby
    Passageway Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 22Two Cool Four School
    Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 22Cartograffiti
    Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 22Brought To The Table
    Saarinen House, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 22Altars
    Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • 22Greenhouse Group Show
    Goldner Walsh Garden and Home, Pontiac, MI

SELECTED HONORS, AWARDS & RESIDENCIES

  • Featured on Contemporary Art Library
  • 26Collected into Eames Office Archive (CA)
  • 26Work Collected into MillerKnoll Design Yard (MI)
  • 25Society of Typographic Arts - STA 100
  • 25Parts and Labor visiting resident
  • 24GDUSA Book Award
  • 23Society of Typographic Arts - STA 100
  • 23The Robert C. Larson Venture Award
  • 22GDUSA Students To Watch
  • 21Cranbrook Academy of Art Merit Scholarship

TEACHING

  • 26Hope College
    Lecturer/Special Lecturer, Design 1, 2. Consultant
  • 25University of Texas at San Antonio
    Guest Speaker
  • 24Taylor University
    Speaker, Art Careers Symposium
  • 22-23Oakland University
    Lecturer/Special Lecturer, Graphic Design 1
  • 23Oakland University
    Guest Critic
  • 22Lawrence Technical University
    Guest Critic
  • 22Western Michigan University
    Guest Critic
  • 15Taylor University
    Visiting Instructor, Digital Tools

SELECT CLIENTS/COLLABORATORS

  • Pentagram Design
    New York, NY
  • Cranbrook Art Museum
    Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • Cranbrook Academy of Art
    Bloomfield Hills, MI
  • MillerKnoll
    Holland/Zeeland, MI
  • Design Within Reach
    Stamford, Connecticut
  • Tobin Smith Architects
    San Antonio, TX
  • Phaidon Press
    New York, NY
  • Set Margins
    Eindhoven, Netherlands
  • Karma Gallery
    New York, NY
  • HALF Gallery
    New York, NY
  • Magenta Plains
    New York, NY
  • DC CAH
    Washington, DC
  • The Kresge Foundation
    Detroit, MI
  • Buffalo Prescott
    Detroit, MI
  • Mouse Gallery
    Detroit, MI
  • Parts and Labor
    San Antonio, TX
  • Hope College
    Holland, MI
  • The Stoke Group
    Salt Lake City, UT
  • Bittersweet Creative
    Washington, DC
  • Bittersweet Monthly
    Washington, DC