Firelei Báez

"When I look at a figure, when I'm trying to cobble up a meaning, it's never something that's linear or can be easily described. I want to create something that has all the complexity of experience and many layers of history and language."

–– Firelei Báez, 2022

Firelei Báez is an artist whose multilayered practice examines the politics of place and heritage. Often anchored by women protagonists and a fantastical use of color, Báez mines a global array of visual references and historical material to reclaim personhood for diasporic communities.

A sense of living in-between was instilled in Báez at a young age. Born to a Dominican mother and father of Haitian descent, she grew up on the border between Hispaniola's Dominican Republic and Haiti and became increasingly aware of the racial, ethnic, and class tensions between the two countries. In 1991 she moved to Miami, and in high school she studied reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings in European art history books. While studying painting and printmaking at Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2001–4), she encountered pressure to work in abstraction and not explicitly address identity, which encouraged her to begin "speaking about marginality through color."

Around 2005 she returned to figuration and reimagined the ciguapa––a Hispaniola folkloric woman trickster––as a symbol of empowerment. While Báez pursued her MFA at Hunter College (2010), she elaborated on her interest in self-portraiture through a daily exercise of documenting her silhouette, while retaining the gaze of her eyes "out of a need for personal agency." This remained the case in the series Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test (2010–12), which critically reflects upon colonial histories of colorism and racial bias based on hair and complexion in the Dominican Republic and American South.

In the following years, Báez began pouring expanses of vivid colors onto canvas, locating within those forms the presence of women "in a way that's expansive and limitless." A serpentine tignon––a headwrap legally required to be worn by women of color in eighteenth-century New Orleans––is also a frequently used motif, merging African and Caribbean diasporic symbols sourced from textiles. Through her portraits of historical, imagined, folkloric, and literary figures, she asks, "How do you make someone present when history has made such an effort to erase them?"

In 2012, Báez began to paint directly onto deaccessioned library books, inserting the presence of women and feminine archetypes into historical book pages to "disrupt the narrative that exists about the Caribbean, and in broader terms, the African diaspora in a global context." Báez developed this disruption into monumental paintings, merging historical maps, manuals, and travelogues with her expansive pours of color, which mutate and form into imaginative figures, animals, and explosive fields of color such as in Untitled (Premiere Carte Pour L'Introduction a L'Histoire de Monde) (2022, SAAM).

Drawing on her personal history, Báez's practice revisits the past to acknowledge and embrace evolving diasporic identities, exploring possibilities for healing and resistance. As she once stated, "In my lived experience, art has literally been a tool of healing. I come from a family of all nurses––they're focused on healing. And I always thought of myself and my work as an extension of that."

Authored by Gabriella Shypula, American Women's History Initiative Writer and Editor, 2024.