Label
Don Baum was an assemblage artist first and foremost, working the detritus of the vernacular into bristly sculptures and friezes that tweaked the ponderous and pretentious in art history. Around 1979, influenced by a book about medieval peasant life, he began a series of house-shaped sculptures. Utterly simple in form, these explorations of primordial shelter were covered with exuberant collages of travel brochures and copies of Renaissance murals mixed with scraps of old paintings, wallpaper, game boards, and whatever else he could scrounge up in junk shops. In ARF the homey images of paint-by-number hunting scenes and landscapes are somehow harmonized with a painting of the Last Supper, bringing together the subjects of sustenance, humans (and dogs) in nature, and a glimpse of another world.
– Louise Lincoln, from "Re: Chicago"