Where My Hands Have Been

March 7 – March 26, 2026

Design Museum of Chicago
72 E Randolph St
Chicago, IL 60601

Where My Hands Have Been, a solo exhibition by Mack Baker presented by NAOMI Projects in the Design Museum of Chicago Atrium, on view March 7–26, 2026.

“Parts of your body I think of as stripes which I have learned to love along”
—Eileen Myles, Peanut Butter

Where My Hands Have Been explores the history intimacy leaves on the body, the physical impact we have on each other through time. Clay becomes a medium that inherently archives movement: fingerprints, pressure, and handprints remain as evidence of touch. The photographs are from Baker’s archive; 35mm black-and-white film images that echo the sensibilities of Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, and Man Ray. Bodies press together and form new landscapes, where vulnerability reads as strength, resilience, and reflection.

Photography has been foundational to Baker’s practice, often serving as a sketchbook for works in clay. Across the exhibition, the two mediums speak to one another: the figures posed and pushed together return in ceramic forms that hold curvature, tension, and pause. Alongside tenderness, the work considers the body as a fortress, a site of protection from harm, and a quiet place to unravel. The intimacy here is not spectacle; it is an open structure, abstract enough to hold many bodies and many meanings.

The exhibition unfolds through a sequence of encounters: two columns of framed black-and-white photographs establish intimacy as a structure, while two color photographs in the windows widen the register toward earth and sky. At the center, ceramic works stand tall, as wall-mounted ceramics extend from the three-sided tower, forms that hold tension and pause in space. There is an undeniable raw intimacy and emotion held within white knuckles, clenched knees, and flexed hips which seeks to overflow, to leak out and burst at the seams.