Lamar Baker began his art studies at the High Museum School in Atlanta with Ben Shute. In 1935 he relocated to New York City to continue at the Art Students League, where he was strongly influenced by his teacher, Harry Sternberg, and the social realist painters and printmakers of the time. Through Sternberg’s teaching and from his exposure to the work of Thomas Hart Benton, Louis Lozowick, and New Orleans artist John McCrady, Baker gravitated toward familiar social issues such as the struggle of non-unionized cotton-mill workers, racial injustice and violence, backroom politics, and the social strata of the old South. In 1940 the essayist and civil rights advocate Alan Locke wrote of Bakers role in providing the American public with anew artistic frankness and social honesty, the latest notes of searching social analysis and protest.
