August 7, 1929
1946-1949
1966
Born as Josephine Gail Kleinberg in Seattle, Washington. Attends the University of Washington, Seattle. Majors in biology and takes first-year painting and drawing art courses.
1949
Marries Gerard L. Hanauer, Seattle.
1950
Works during spring and summer on Kibbutz Kabri in Nahariya, Israel. Moves to New York City.
1966-1967
1950-1953
1953
December 1955 1957
Attends the New School for Social Research, New York City, studies with the Graduate Faculty in Gestalt Psychology. Marries the television writer Richard Baer. Moves to Los Angeles.
1959
Starts living with artist John Wesley in California.
1960
Adopts a reductive, hard-edge painting style. Returns to New York City in June. Marries John Wesley, first in Mexico and then again in New York.
1962
Summer: begins her first mature series of work. Meets Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd.
1962-1963
Executes graph-paper paintings and drawings, as well as Korean Paintings.
1964
Makes series of paintings in various formats: large squares, small squares, vertical rectangles and horizontal rectangles with fully enclosing borders. Takes part in her first shows: Eleven Artists, organized by Dan Flavin at the Kaymar Gallery in New York, and in the inaugural exhibition of the John Daniels Gallery, run by Dan Graham.
Dialogues with other artists.
1967
Stations of the Spectrum: six paintings with gray backgrounds.
1968
Double Bar Series with gray backgrounds. Lives with the artist Robert Lobe, her companion for the next seven years.
1969
Wraparound paintings on gray backgrounds. Begins experimenting with diagonal and curved forms. Receives grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Birth of son, Joshua. Begins experimenting with various Abstract Expressionist idioms. Work characterized by strong light-dark contrasts. Associates peripherally with the Walter Hopps-Edward Kienholz-run Ferus Gallery.
Creates diptych and triptych paintings in several formats and hanging configurations: horizontals flanking, verticals flanking, squares flanking and horizontals stacked and verticals stacked. First oneperson show held at the Fischbach Gallery, New York. She shows eleven paintings. Later she adds one painting more to each of the four kinds in the series. Participates in Lawrence Alloway’s Systemic Painting show in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
1969-1970
Teaches at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Publishes an article on “Mach Bands”, a perceptual edge phenomenon, in Aspen magazine.
Jo Baer, New York, 1975
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Jo Baer — Broadsides & Belles Lettres
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