Lillian Bayley Hoover is a painter whose work examines the shifting relationship between people and the landscapes they inhabit. Beginning with direct encounters in the natural world, her paintings consider the many ways our understanding of nature is mediated—through memory, history, science, and human intervention. Moving fluidly between abstraction and representation, Hoover creates layered compositions that invite reflection on the porous boundaries between the human and the more-than-human world. Her paintings suggest that landscape is never a passive backdrop, but an active participant in the unfolding of time, bearing witness to both geological change and human experience.
Over the course of her career, Hoover's practice has evolved from investigations of architectural space to an increasingly nuanced engagement with landscapes shaped by deep geological time and the marks of human presence. Attentive to the ordinary and often overlooked, her work explores the dialogue between external environments and interior emotional states, asking how place informs memory, perception, and belonging.
Hoover received a Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina Asheville. She is Professor of Art at Towson University. Her work has been featured on the cover of New American Paintings and is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the University of Maryland Global Campus, and the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
In 2020, Hoover received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Additional honors include the Trawick Prize, three Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, multiple semifinalist selections for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize, and a travel grant from the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia. She has participated in artist residencies at I-Park Foundation (Connecticut), the Vermont Studio Center, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program in Léhon, France, Monson Arts in Maine, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Instituto Sacatar on the island of Itaparica, Bahia, Brazil.
Recent solo exhibitions include Crosscurrents: Works from the Contemporary Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fissures in the Frame at the Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, Delaware; Hitched to Everything Else at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Virginia; How Do We Know the World? at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Presence in Absence at Goya Contemporary, Baltimore; Into the Void at the Center for the Arts, Towson University; Making Meaning at the Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina; and Exposition des Peintres du Programme International Alfred et Trafford Klots at the Abbaye de Léhon in Brittany, France.