Jordan Baker-Caldwell is an artist, sculptor, and designer. The city’s colorful, chaotic, and singular mosaic formed his creative backdrop as he began sculpting clay figures at the art market from as young as eight — the youngest person with his own booth, already learning what it meant to put work in front of strangers and let them decide.

His parents set the conditions. His mother, Sandy Baker, is a pioneering fine jewelry designer and the first Black woman to build a significant career in that industry. His father brought music, technology, and a hands-on curiosity about how things worked. The artistic and the technical arrived together, early, and they never fully separated.

He grew up in a home where West African and Senegalese sculpture shared walls with paintings by Varnette P. Honeywood, Ernie Barnes, and Ellis Wilson. Anime arrived through his father and through friends he holds close to this day. Neon Genesis Evangelion was among them — monumental in its reach, pulling from the imagery of gods and sacred architecture without pausing to explain itself. Video games were part of the same education. He played Sonic the Hedgehog with his father, a character whose silhouette alone communicates speed, attitude, and freedom, one point in a lineage of iconic figures rooted in the earliest vernacular image, running through Astro Boy and beyond. Later came NiGHTS into Dreams, a game whose entire logic was the embodiment of grace in motion.

The impulse to reduce a gesture to its bare essence runs through religious iconography, Egyptian architectural sculpture, West African masks, Mesoamerican glyphs, anime character design, and brand identity. Cultures separated by millennia, all discovering that a simplified form can carry a civilization’s worth of meaning.

Working in steel, bronze, and industrial materials, he builds sculptures that occupy a space between object and monument, where physical structure and symbolic resonance converge. He is the youngest artist to have two permanent public sculptures in New York City.

Technology is woven through the practice, not applied to it. The Surelo exhibition ran both in a brick-and-mortar gallery at the Port Authority and in the Metaverse. The two venues were not in tension. They were the same argument made in two different spaces.

He is still making that argument, just finding new ways to say it.