Helena Baka

This work is a way of celebrating the love I have for my unapologetic hyper-femininity and embracing my girlhood into my womanhood. It’s through my childhood nostalgia and misogynistic experiences that I visually express this celebration of the woman I’ve become today – from growing up with obsessing over plushies and Sanrio characters, to Winx and The Powerpuff Girls, Bratz dolls, Tamogotchi’s, and so on, I blossomed into a woman who shows cleavage for herself and gives the middle finger to cat-callers, while kind of still loving most of the “girly-girl” things I swooned over in my childhood. My work expresses a love for the feminine and all women who need a pick-me-up or support. It’s a tribute to those who faced too much discrimination for them to finally embrace their identities today. I use bright, flashy colors or fantastical imagery to grab your attention so you can recognize that as a woman, I love all women, I love being a woman, and I am not sorry for it.

Helena Baka is best known for her colorful, abstract paintings that often portray the dual themes of recognizable figuration and fantasy, as well as her rudimentary ceramic pieces. A first-generation daughter to Albanian immigrants, Helena’s work is inspired by the distance she’s felt toward her culture in her childhood and the complicated impact it’s had on her identity in adulthood, as well as themes of femininity, girlhood, and the grotesque. Along with ceramics, the mediums she uses range from acrylic and oil paint to chalk and oil pastels to communicate the complexity of the figures and personal symbolism in her work. Helena received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2021 and currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.