Anita Yarost Baxter
Portrait by Robert Wilbert, 1967
Anita Yarost Baxter was born in New York on October 28, 1933. She moved to Detroit as a child and attended Cass Technical High School and later Wayne State University, where she earned her MFA in the mid 1950s. She married Seymour Baxter in 1957 and had three children; Alexander, Daniel, and David. In the 1960s she was shown by Bob Hanamura, whose gallery was one of only two avant garde galleries in Detroit at the time. Her contemporaries included Robert Wilbert, Jens and Nancy Plum, Al Mullin, Michael Lukes and others in the Detroit art scene.
In addition to painting, she taught art history at Oakland community college, earned a masters degree in social work and eventually became a psychotherapist. She continued to paint but did not show her work from the 1970s on. Later in life, she taught her young grandchildren, Billie and Echo, to draw and both have since become superb animators. Anita Yarost Baxter died on January 7, 2013 at the age of 79.
This newsletter is a tribute to her, and an archive of her work. I will post new paintings and drawings as often as possible.
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