Firelei Báez

Firelei Báez (born 1981) is a Dominican Republic-born, New York City-based artist known for intricate works on paper and canvas, as well as large scale sculpture. Her art focuses on untold stories and unheard voices, using portraiture, landscape, and design to explore the Western canon.

She has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award (2010), the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting, the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting (2015), and the Chiaro Award from the Headlands (2016). In 2015, Pérez Art Museum Miami organized Firelei Báez: Bloodlines. The exhibition catalogue included an introduction by Franklin Sirmans, the museum director, an essay by María Elena Ortiz, an interview with Naima Keith, and a contribution by the writer Roxane Gay.

Early life and education Báez was born in 1981 in Santiago de Los Caballeros to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, she was raised in Dajabón, a market city on the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti. At the age of 8, she relocated with her family to Miami, Florida.

Báez moved to New York in 2001 where she then received a bachelor's degree in arts from Cooper Union, a master's in fine arts from Hunter College in 2010, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is known for intricate works on paper and canvas, as well as large scale sculpture and installation. In 2012, she began to create her ink and acrylic paintings on Yupo paper because of its nonabsorbent properties. Starting around 2017, the artist has directed her practice towards large scale works in which she directly paints onto various archival materials such as maps and architectural renderings.

Her art explores the Western canon through the elements of non-Western reading. Báez references various aspects of visual, material, and popular culture to represent the body in ways that challenge racial and class structures. She credits the work of David Hammons as first sparking her interest in using art to abstract and visualize Black and Brown bodies while simultaneously conveying their lived experiences.

In fall of 2015, Báez had two solo museum shows Patterns of Resistance at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and Bloodlines at Pérez Art Museum Miami. In February 2016, Báez created a participatory installation with museum patrons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The program was presented in conjunction with the exhibition "The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor". The installation itself remained on display through March of that year.

Public art Báez' glass mosaic tile mural for the New York Metro In 2018, she was commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to install two glass-tile platform-level murals and two mezzanine-level murals for the 163 St-Amsterdam Avenue subway station. The intricate, tropical patterns of the artwork, titled The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao (after a novel by Junot Diaz), refer to Báez' Caribbean background and to the demographics of the neighborhood. The mural imagery includes flowers and vines of tropical and North American plant species; these complex patterns are interwoven with images of "hand symbols" and female figures in the style of Ciguapas from the folklore of the Dominican Republic. Báez describes the work as having a level of "transparency" to Dominicans in the neighborhood. The glass mosaic work was produced by Mayer of Munich based on Báez' designs.

Exhibitions

Báez has participated in several solo exhibitions and shows in the United States and internationally. Her solo shows include Psycho*Pomp (2012), Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno; Firelei Báez: Bloodlines (2015), Pérez Art Museum Miami; Firelei Báez: Joy Out of Fire (2018), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Modern Window: For Améthyste and Athénaire (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy's Canon), Anaconas (2018-2019), Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Firelei Báez (2021), ICA Watershed, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

She has also participated in a number of group shows and exhibitions, including El Museo del Barrio Biennial (2011-2012), Prospect New Orleans (2014), and the Berlin Biennale (2018).

Firelei Báez's work was featured in the traveling group show and accompanying publication Spirit in the Land, organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in 2023 and on view at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2024. The show touches on aspects of her by commenting on the relationship between human bodies and the natural world. In 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston exhibited the first major career retrospective on the work of the artist. Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Can I Pass? series Every day from 2011 to 2013, Báez created self-portraits in which she would paint a silhouette of her face, head, hair, and shoulders. Each painting she created was made in a color that matched her forearm and resembled that of a paper bag. Through this color, she references the historical Brown paper bag test to spotlight the discriminatory tests and practices that have been used to classify blackness in the United States. Her attention to hairstyles in these portraits of herself also connects the silhouettes to the fan test that evolved within the Dominican Republic that associates hair which does not blow straight back with African ancestry.

Imagery, symbolism, and themes Throughout her work, Báez references symbols and figures from Dominican folklore and history that highlight different aspects of femininity, race, power, and nature. One recurring motif in her work is the Ciguapa that appeared in a series of works that she painted from 2005 to 2015. She also includes Anacaona, another significant figure in mythology and folklore from Hispaniola, in a map painting titled Untitled (Anacaona) that explores how the body can act as a symbol of resistance, independence, and struggle. Future Generation Art Prize (2017). College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2018) Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2019) Soros Art Fellowship (2019) The Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts (2020) American Academy in Rome Philip Guston Rome Prize for visual arts (2021)

Gallery representation Báez has been represented by Hauser & Wirth since 2023. She previously worked with James Cohan Gallery and Kavi Gupta.

Notable works in public collections Amidst the future and present there is a memory table (2013), Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York To see beyond it and to access the places that we know outside its walls (2015), San Jose Museum of Art, California Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body) (2015), Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida Of Love Possessed (lessons on alterity for G.D. and F.G at a local BSS) (2016), Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta To Access the Places that Lie Beyond (2017), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Elegant gathering in a secluded garden (or the many bridges we crossed) (2018), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Those who would douse it (it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes you does not mean I relinquish it) (2018), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany An Open Horizon (or the stillness of a wound) (2019), Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Orlando, Florida Tignon for Ayda Weddo (or that which a center can not hold) (2019), Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina the trace, whether we are attending to it or not (a space for each other's breathing) (2019), New Orleans Museum of Art Untitled (Central Power Station) (2019), Dallas Museum of Art Untitled (Tabula Anemographica seu Pyxis Navtic) (2021), Whitney Museum of American Art Olamina (How do we learn to love each other while we are embattled) (2022), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Selected publications Perez Art Museum. Firelei Báez : Bloodlines. Miami, Florida: Perez Art Museum, 2015. . "Bodies of Color: Images of Women in the Works of Firelei Báez and Rachelle Mozman." Aranda-Alvarado, Rocío. Small Axe : a Journal of Criticism 21, no. 1 (2017): 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-3844078.