Nancy Baker Cahill (b. 1970) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose hybrid practice spans drawing, video, augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain-based projects.Her work examines systemic power, selfhood, and embodied consciousness.,Her monumental AR works extend and subvert the lineage of Land art, often addressing the climate crisis and civic life.
Drawing has anchored Baker Cahill's practice since she began experimenting with abstraction in 2010.She moved into virtual reality around 2015, after a curator suggested she translate her large-scale drawings into the medium.She founded 4th Wall, a free augmented reality app for interacting with her immersive public artworks.,Through 4th Wall, she produced Liberty Bell (2020–21), commissioned by the Art Production Fund and installed from Boston to Selma, Alabama. The piece ties the cracked historic bell's symbolism to the unresolved promise of liberty during the 2020 US election. Mushroom Cloud (2021), developed with lawyer Sarah Conley Odenkirk for Miami, juxtaposes an atomic blast with a spreading mycelial network to link self-annihilation with ecological interdependence.The piece was later shown outdoors at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles as part of the Getty's PST ART initiative.
In Contract Killers (2021), an augmented reality series minted as NFTs, Baker Cahill worked with Odenkirk to attach each work to a legally binding written contract addressing gaps in NFT marketplace protections for creators and buyers.That same year she created Legacy, a site-specific AR drawing of an abstracted tree twisting and breaking apart, commissioned by SXSW and shown at synthesis gallery on Berlin's Tempelhofer Feld. The work addresses gentrification and climate change in the city.For her Slipstream works, she scans 3D models from physical torn-paper sculptures to produce paired physical prints and digital videos accessible by QR code.The exhibition “Slipstream: Table of Contents” at Vellum in Los Angeles (2022) was acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
In Stone Speaks (2022), she collaborated with Sophia the Robot on a site-specific AR piece exploring human-machine collaboration amid the climate crisis, shown as part of “Posthuman Vernacular”.CENTO is a participatory augmented reality creature installed on the Whitney Museum's Floor 8 terrace. Visitors worldwide can add feathers to its evolving body through a free app, exploring interspecies cooperation amid the climate crisis. Her retrospective “Through Lines” traveled to the Georgia Museum of Art from October 2023 to March 2024.In 2025 she exhibited WIDOW III, extending her digital drawing and AR practice into hybrid sculptural form, as part of “Places & Spaces” at Friedrichs Pontone in New York.
