Baber began her art studies early, studying drawing as an eight-year-old, and taking a college class by age twelve.  After living in Paris for several years, she moved to New York City where she became a member of the March Gallery, a Tenth Street co-operative gallery, with her first one-person show in 1958.  She attended the Yaddo Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York for the first time that year, supporting herself by writing, later becoming art editor of McCall's magazine.

Baber was in a marriage from 1964-1970 to abstract painter Paul Jenkins; her stain paintings exploring variations of a single color, or in rich combinations of multiple colors, usually using free-form ovals and circles, are different from her husband's wet-in-wet/ivory palette knife "flow" paintings.

Baber organized exhibitions of women artist, and was a distinguished writer and teacher as well as an artist, serving as artist-in-residence in Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico's Tamarind Institute lithography workshop.  Baber also taught painting at the New School, New York City; University of California at Santa Barbara; and University of California, Berkeley.

Several of her paintings form the nucleus of the Greater Lafayette Museum of Art in Indiana, and in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, the Guild Hall Museum created the Alice Baber Memorial Art Library. Her work is in the collections of major New York City museums: the Guggenheim; the Whitney; the Metropolitan; and MOMA; in Washington, D.C. in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and National Museum of Women in the Arts.  Other collections include museums in India; England; The Netherlands; Japan; Israel; Austria; and Germany. In California her paintings may be found at LACMA, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. There is an Alice Baber Memorial Art Library in Easthampton, New York, and a collection of paintings in Lafayette, Illinois.

Selected Articles:

James Jones, "The Tragedy of Color," Studio International, September 1965

Norton T. Dodge, "Alice Baber: Color, Light & Image," catalog, St. Mary's City, Maryland, 1977

Ann McCoy, "Alice Baber: Light as Subject," Art International, September-October 1980

Sylvia Moore, "Alice Baber," Woman's Art Journal, Spring-Summer 1982

Alexandra de Lallier, "The Watercolors of Alice Baber," Woman's Art Journal, 1982.