About the Artist
When I lived in Japan, I became attuned to beauty in unexpected juxtapositions: a Shinto shrine beside a pachinko parlor, a rice paddy pressed against a highway. I recall walking down a busy street and spying a small shrine nestled between two large, modern buildings. The sacred and the ordinary coexisted without hierarchy, and I was moved by how seamlessly they occupied the same space.
Back in the San Francisco Bay Area, I began to see my surroundings through that same lens. Here, too, contrasts live side by side: infrastructure threading through wetlands, development edging up against open land. There is a particular wildness in this region. The flora feels untamed, almost primordial. Eucalyptus groves lean in the wind, tidal marshes shift with the light. Even within suburban grids, something elemental persists, as though older rhythms pulse beneath the surface.
Some of my paintings reference these landscapes directly, capturing moments where the built and the natural meet. Others abstract that tension through scale, gesture, and color. Thick passages of oil, chromatic depth, and layered surfaces echo the density and vitality of the land itself. In both approaches, I am searching for the same thing: the quiet power that emerges where the ordinary and the ancient coexist.
These works are an ode to that coexistence, to the beauty embedded in unlikely pairings, and to the wildness that endures, even in unexpected places.
BIO
Bailliere holds an MFA in visual art from Mills College, a BA cum laude in French from Duke University with extensive coursework in visual art and art history, and a post-bac in visual art and design from UC Berkeley. While on a Duke junior year abroad in Paris, she studied art history at the Université de Paris and painting at the Académie de Port-Royal. Bailliere spent a high school semester at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Lacoste, France where she focused solely on drawing and painting. As an elementary school student, she attended Saturday high school figure drawing classes at the Maryland Institute College of Art in her hometown of Baltimore.
In addition to sustaining an active studio practice, Bailliere is an adjunct professor of art at both Contra Costa College and at Los Medanos College where she teaches drawing and painting.
Bailliere's work has been presented at Hang Gallery, the San Francisco Art Fair, Art Miami, the Mills College Art Museum, the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Art Center, among other venues. Bailliere was a recipient of Jill Miller's (UCBerkeley professor of art practice) Being Human artist residency at the Palo Alto Art Center in 2018, and in 2016, she was a finalist for a residency fellowship at the Headlands Center of the Arts. Her paintings will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Hang Gallery in Fall 2026. Her work is included in many private collections and the following corporate collections:
Bay Area based Healthcare Facility (5 paintings)
Brown Advisory
Chicken and Egg Pictures
Citizens Bank
Freshfields Law Offices of San Francisco
Green17 Design
Mayo Clinic (Integrated Oncology Building, Jacksonville, Florida) (3 paintings)
among others.
Bailliere's work is represented by Hang Art in San Francisco. Please direct inquiries to info@hangart.com.
All artwork ©Alexandra Bailliere, artwork photographed
by Dana Davis.
Portrait photo credit to Anne Sherwood.