The Curative Power of Art

“Artists are a kind of conduit,” says Malado Francine Baldwin ’97. “We’re able to speak to moments in time, to find and create beauty amidst chaos. Art makes us slow down, pay attention, feel things more deeply.”

For 30 years now, Baldwin has been attentive to liminal spaces, performing the kind of alchemy that gives shape, color, and texture to dreams and ideas. Inspired by world cultures both ancient and contemporary, she creates new narratives of cultural inheritance in diverse media. She paints, draws, sculpts, embroiders, films, and even employs 3D printing to share what she’s thinking with the world.

Baldwin grew up in a mixed-race family, spending her formative years in Senegal and Mali, and her rich multicultural experiences flow through her work. Her major in comparative literature at Swarthmore also provided an open framework for exploring diverse disciplines, and she’s grateful for the liberal arts education that equipped her to delve into layers and meaning in her art.

“That strong foundation was incredibly important in my work. It’s still feeding me today,” she says.

Baldwin has been reimagining artifacts like films and notebooks from her Swarthmore days in recent projects, including her Lost Tapes series of films.

An enthusiastic and curious lifelong learner, Baldwin has approached side careers over the years — in film, publishing, and art conservation — as research for her art. These months of working remotely during quarantine have afforded her a rare time of deep focus and immersion in her environment, for which she’s grateful as she looks toward what she calls “the wise years” of her mid-career.

“Stubbornness and fortitude have made me very resilient as an artist,” she says, “and I call on that at times like this.” The artist’s role has always included that of healer, or shaman, and Baldwin has been mulling over possibilities for how, once the pandemic is over, artists can offer the global community ways to process its manifold losses.

Inspired by various sacred traditions, Baldwin recently designed a series of beautifully embroidered “Inner Light” collars. Struck by the intersection with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s symbolic collars, she gave a collar to Ginsburg last summer — in gratitude for her tireless advocacy for equality and justice for all Americans. In her heartfelt letter accompanying the gift, Baldwin wrote, “I believe art has the capacity to heal, unite, and beautify our world.”