Firelei Baez


Firelei Báez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic and lives and works in New York City. She makes intricate works on paper and canvas as well as large scale sculpture. Through a convergence of interest in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity and women's work, her art explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies, which have an ability to live with cultural ambiguities and use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions.
In 2016 and 2017 she participated in group and solo museum exhibitions at the Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles, CA as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time's LA>LA exhibition, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, and with the Pinchuk Art Foundation's Future Generation's Art Prize exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Báez has held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Joan Mitchell Center, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Lower East Side Print Shop, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace. Báez's work has been written about in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Art in America, New American Paintings, The Huffington Post, Studio Museum Magazine and is featured in the Phaidon contemporary drawing anthology Vitamin D2. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, New York, NY, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, the New Orleans Biennial Prospect.3, New Orleans, LA, Taller Puertorriqueño, Philadelphia, PA, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY, the Drawing Center, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY and the Studio Museum, New York, NY. Her work was featured in the United States Biennial Prospect.3 in New Orleans, LA, curated by Franklin Sirmans.
She has been the recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting, the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, and the Chiaro Award from the Headlands. In 2015 The Pérez Art Miami Museum published Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, with an introduction by the museum's Director, Franklin Sirmans, an essay by Assistant Curator María Elena Ortiz, an interview with Naima Keith and a contribution by writer Roxane Gay.

Early life and education

Born to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, the self-described "Caribbean hybrid" was raised in Dajabón, a market city on the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti. As a child, Báez recalls seeing the landscapes of both countries from her home, with views of Haiti's dying, deforested landscape standing in stark contrast to the verdant valleys and mountains of the Dominican Republic. Dividing the two countries is the Dajabón River, the site of the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians at the hands of Dominican President Rafael Trujillo's brutal regime.
That landscape, which has long been a vivid symbol of the violent history between the two countries — which are again locked in a humanitarian crisis over Dominican attempts to deport thousands of Haitians — haunts Báez's work.
At the age of 10, she relocated with her family to Miami. The move had a profound impact on her. In the Dominican Republic, Báez says, racial identity was much more complicated. But in the United States, those shades of gray were suddenly gone.
"There's a fluidity of color, of race, in the Caribbean," she says. "In America, you're black or white."

That didn't make race less fraught. Rather, it added another layer of "otherness" to Báez's understanding of herself. "As someone born in the DR but raised mostly in the United States, I am constantly navigating ways of articulating something that is familiar but also very distant," she says.
Báez received an M.F.A. from Hunter College and a B.F.A. from Cooper Union and studied at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has had solo exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the DePaul Art Museum.

Career

Báez's lush paintings often foreground female bodies and faces, incorporating imagery associated with various cultural symbols, from palm fronds and feathers to tufts of fur and intricate textile patterns. Rendered with the artist's precise touch, in acrylics and gouaches, her works coalesce to form powerful narratives around ancestry and cultural identity. Báez gained much-deserved exposure last fall with her solo museum shows “Patterns of Resistance” at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and “Bloodlines” at Perez Art Museum Miami. “I looked at the idea of ancestry in a way that extended beyond the physical bloodline to explore the idea of a lineage of resistance and self-definition, which is especially tricky when you’re the product of an ahistorical narrative, as many are from the African diaspora,” Báez says of the Miami show, an expanded iteration of which will travel on to other institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum. “I started incorporating the figure into my work as a way to navigate my own sense of identity, particularly because I came from a place that didn’t fit into one specific narrative. It was a way for me to untangle what I was going through on a daily basis.”
MetFridays: Báez's participatory installation was displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art features artists leading participants in making a collaborative installation that's inspired by visitors to the museum's gift shop. Afterward, the installation remained on view through March 2016. The program was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor.
Aside from museum exhibitions, Báez has also held numerous residencies throughout the country. She has held residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop, and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace. Additional residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist in Residence, Dieu Donné Paper Mill, Workspace Artist in Residence, and Wave Hill, Workspace Artist in Residence.
Báez is currently represented by James Cohan Gallery and Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Grants, awards, and residencies

Firelei Báez: Bloodlines |
Publisher: Perez Art Museum; First edition. edition |

Publications (Articles/Webpages)

Edwards, Stassa. Miami New Times, Dec. 1, 2015.
Vogel, Wendy. "Firelei Báez." Art in America, vol. 104, no. 1, Jan. 2016, p. 29.
Aranda-Alvarado, R. "Bodies of Color: Images of Women in the Works of Firelei Báez and Rachelle Mozman." Small Axe, vol. 21 no. 1, 2017, pp. 58–70.