Joe Baker

Joe Baker, enrolled member of Delaware Tribe of Indians, is a direct line descendent of notable Lenape leaders, including Simon Whiteturkey, Captain Anderson Sarcoxie (Treaty of Greenville 1795), Captain White Eyes (Treaty of Fort Pitt 1778), Netawatwees or King Newcomer (Treaty of Conestoga 1763), Tamanend, King Tammany (1625-1701), Chief Nutimus (signed the confirmation deed, Walking Purchase 1737).

Baker is co-founder, executive director of Lenape Center in Manhattan, and an artist, educator, and curator who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past 30 years. Baker is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York, and was recently Visiting Professor of Museum Studies at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He serves as a board member for The Endangered Language Fund, CUNY, and is on the Advisory Committee for the National Public Art Consortium, New York. Baker is also a cultural advisor for the new CBS series, Ghosts.

Baker has guided, in his capacity as executive director for Lenape Center, partnerships with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (his work is currently on exhibit there), Brooklyn Museum of Art, American Ballet Theater, Moulin Rouge on Broadway, The Whitney Museum of Art, and others. He served as a consultant for BKSK Architects for the renovation of the international award-winning Tammany Hall in New York, and is cultural consultant for Inwood Scared Sites for the development and conceptual design of a project in the Inwood community, Manhattan. In partnership with Farm Hub in the Hudson River Valley, Baker and Lenape Center are championing the return of ancestral seeds in the homeland through a seed rematriation project. This seed saving project, now in its second year, has done much to contribute to the cultural foodways of the Lenape diaspora.

In partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, Baker is the curator of the first ever Lenape exhibition of cultural arts in the city of New York, opening January 2021. Baker graduated from the University of Tulsa with a BFA degree in Design and an MFA in painting and drawing, and completed postgraduate study, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, MDP Program.