Creighton Baxter: You Missed & Again Again Again

The diptych billboard You Missed  and  Again  Again  Again  by  alumna Creighton Baxter (BFA ’13) offers visual and textual entry points from the artist’s interdisciplinary practice, with imagery informed by drawing and performance. Scrawled black-and-red lines energize the surface, composing half-formed bodies that emerge from and recede into negative space. Baxter punctuates these voids with stars, teardrops, and spirals, all colloquialisms reminiscent of childhood doodling. And like a chant or warning, block letters repeatedly declare “YOU MISSED” on the left, and “AGAIN / AGAIN / AGAIN” on the right.  

In an affirmation of the artist’s hand, Baxter’s two-panel work revives the daydream ritual of doodling as a critical practice in her commission for Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA). On one hand, the artist hearkens back to drawing as a medium of permanent mark-making; on the other, she beckons viewers to take seriously the proposition and potential of drawing to resist fixity. In this fugitive state, Baxter’s figural abstractions, textual hybridity, and amorphous landscapes portray a transing of bodies, language, and space-time.  

Broaching such thresholds as a student in Catholic school, then later in her studies at the SMFA, and now as an artist working at the intersections of temporality and subject formation, Baxter contextualizes and decontextualizes herself in the work. Her marks unveil the “me” hidden beneath spirals, while simultaneously proclaiming “YOU MISSED.” In challenging our contemporary proclivity to “read” too quickly, Baxter insists that we pause, look closely, configure, and then reconfigure—again, again, again.  

You Missed and Again Again Again by Creighton Baxter is on view on The Fenway through spring 2027. The billboard accompanies the 150th anniversary of the founding of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, our yearlong celebration of the SMFA’s history, pedagogy, and alumni in exhibitions and installations at TUAG. 

Through a practice rooted in drawing and performance, Creighton Baxter (b. Arizona, USA) explores the overlaps between text, gesture, matter, and image. Her live performances of swallowing drawings have been activated at The Geffen Contemporary, Poetry Project, and MoMA; and her installations have appeared at Montserrat College of Art, University of Hartford, and Boston University.  

Baxter’s drawings have been acquired by the Modern & Contemporary collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum along with numerous private collections. Her illustrations and artworks have been published in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Impulse Magazine, Art Papers, and The New Yorker amongst others.  

She has produced exhibition writing for Et al Projects and JB Blunk Estate; and designed the cover artwork for Feminism Against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney from Duke University Press. Baxter earned her BFA from SMFA at Tufts University, and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University.