Alice Baber, painter and printmaker, was born in Charleston, Illinois on 22 August 1928. Due to Alice’s poor health, she spent much of her childhood traveling between Illinois and Florida; travel would continue to be an important aspect of her life as her artistic career flourished.

Baber attended the Lindenwood College for Women (now Lindenwood University) in St. Charles, Missouri, and the Indiana University Bloomington. At IU Bloomington she studied with Alton Pickens and earned her Master of Arts degree in 1951.

In the early 1950s, Baber moved to New York, where she became a member of the March Gallery, a co-operative gallery, where she would have her first solo exhibition in 1958. In the meantime, she supported herself by writing, and would later become art editor of McCall’s magazine. Baber traveled to Paris in 1958, where she briefly attended the École des Beaux-Arts, and traveled throughout Europe into the 1960s. In 1964, she married the painter Paul Jenkins.

Baber organized a variety of exhibitions of women artists, including the 1972 exhibition “Color Forum” at the University of Texas, and the 1975 exhibition of 125 women artists “Color, Light, and Image,” at the Women’s Interart Center in New York in celebration of the United Nations' International Women's Year. She exhibited internationally, including Japan, India, Iran, and went on a U.S. State Department sponsored lecture and exhibition tour of thirteen Latin American countries.

She taught lithography at the University of New Mexico’s Tamarind Institute, and painting at the New School, New York City, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Baber's work is represented in the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Alice Baber Memorial Art Library in East Hampton, New York and the Baber Midwest Modern Art Collection of the Greater Lafayette Museum in Indiana are named in her honor.

Alice Baber died in New York on 2 October 1982.