Firelei Báez
With election day upon us, I wanted to offer hope for a better future by sharing one of my favorite artists, Firelei Báez. Báez’s paintings are large-scale explosions of color and texture, which is why they appeal to me. Their fantastic scale allows my mind to wander to new realms (I’m a sucker for wandering). But Báez’s art, posthumanist in philosophy, is so much more than visually appealing—it’s a visceral reminder that things can always go differently. Drawing from and destabilizing the past, Baez presents new possibilities for the future. Hauser & Wirth (her gallery) describe it best:
In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plant life, folkloric and literary references, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, Báez’s portraits incorporate the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. These empowered figures’ eyes most often engage directly with the viewer, asserting individuality and agency within their states of flux.
Untitled (Encyclopedia of Gestures / Le Jeu du Monde)
2020 oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas 105 x 131 inches
The emphasis on fluidity and permeability shows us there is never one way of being or seeing, existence is dynamic.
Báez begins many of her pieces by pouring paint over large-scale reproductions of historical documents: maps, travelogues, scientific manuals—documents originally created to claim, colonize, and control. Fantastical creatures and hybrid species overrun these Eurocentric documents, defying categorization and making space for those who have been erased or excluded from the dominant narratives. And this making of space is also a making of new possibilities. As reviewer AX Mina notes, Báez reminds us “that maps advance the fiction that we could treat the earth as an object to be measured, cut up, and extracted from without consequences.” Báez reminds us that the maps themselves are also a fantasy.
The title of AX Mina’s review says it all: Firelei Báez Paints Away the World’s Borders.
And that’s the vision we need for a better future: one that embraces a global community, one that isn’t trying to push us back to a past bent on serving one monolithic identity while exploiting and destroying all others.
Constellation (Movements reimagined)
2019 Oil and Acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 x 2 in
Born in the Dominican Republic, Firelei Báez is a New York City-based artist. Báez received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of many awards, most recently the Cooper Union President’s Citation (2022), Artes Mundi Prize (2021), and Philip Guston Rome Prize (2021).
Untitled (Central Power Station)
2019 Acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas 96 7/8 x 124 5/8 in
Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me)
2024 Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas 228.6 x 207 cm