Lew Baldwin (American, b. 1969) is an artist and filmmaker whose work spans video installation, film, painting, internet-based art and music.His work builds vessels rather than statements — structures other people complete, from browsers stripped of content to installations that respond to a museum visitor's own movement.,
Baldwin launched his first website, redsmoke.com, in 1995 as a vehicle for a fictitious rock band that evolved, in his words, into a depository for the subconscious.The site was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and the following year Baldwin created Milk Milk Lemonade for “BitStreams”, the Whitney's first all-digital exhibition.,In “BitStreams”, visitors affected the installation's graphics and sound simply by moving up and down the museum's stairs.The following year he made GoodWorld for the Whitney, a generative work that erased a website's content and reduced it to abstract magenta and yellow blocks, a response to the flashing ads and pop-ups that then dominated the commercial web.
Baldwin studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after moving from Texas, and worked on Hollywood productions including A League of Their Own, Dennis the Menace and Home Alone 2 before developing his own film practice. His in-camera visual sequences for the feature film November, made with glass, water and ink, won the Cinematography Award at Sundance in 2004, and he composed the film's soundtrack as well. He directed the short film Abraded, shown at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2010, and edited Francesco Vezzoli's The Return of Bruce Nauman's Bouncing Balls in 2006. In 2019 Baldwin returned to painting, drawing on his early digital work — gifs, fantasy and early-web imagery recirculated in a new form. He lives and works in New York City.
