

craiganthonylonghurst
May 21, 20253 min read


craiganthonylonghurst
Apr 20, 20251 min read
Born in New York in 1930 to immigrant parents, Robert Baras was raised and schooled in the Bronx. After attending City College, he joined the family business—a modest textile firm that relations insisted he run. After selling the company at a profit in 1974, Baras embarked on art making full time. He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in 1979, where he received a BFA with honors. A lifetime of uninterrupted painting followed. Its productive joys were eventually cut short by Alzheimer’s, but not before the artist amassed a powerful body of pictographic canvases to rival those of art history’s most allusive minimalists.
Robert Baras’s work, made over a span of thirty years between 1980 and 2010 in New York, Connecticut and Southern France, was largely the output of a tenacious autodidact.
Anita Ben is a ceramic artist based in upstate New York. With a background in fashion and interior design, she discovered ceramics in 2019, drawn to the tactile, organic nature of clay. Inspired by the natural world, her work features earthy textures, muted tones, and forms shaped through experimentation and traditional, mold-free methods. Each piece merges sculptural elegance with functional purpose, inviting connection to the beauty of raw simplicity.