ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Santiago de los Caballeros to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, Firelei Báez’s concerns with the politics of place and heritage can be traced back to her own upbringing on the border between Hispaniola’s two neighboring countries, whose longstanding history of tension is predicated in large part by ethnic difference. Báez’s work ties together subject matter mined from a wide breadth of diasporic narratives. In addition to self-portraiture, past series have examined ciguapas, elusive and cunning female creatures from Dominican folklore; tignons, head-coverings women of color were legally required to wear in 18th century New Orleans; and the iconography of the Black Panther Movement. Báez often paints directly onto historical material, such as found maps, manuals, and travelogues, layering figures over them. By rendering spectacular bodies that exist on opposite sides of intersecting boundaries—between human and landscape, for example, or those reinforcing racial and class stratification—Báez carries portraiture into a liminal space, where subjectivity is rooted in cultural and colonial narratives as much as it can likewise become untethered by them.

Firelei 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. The artist’s work is the subject of a current solo exhibition at the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, and her monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, is included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line Art exhibition. Other solo exhibitions took place this year at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Báez recently participated in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, and was also featured in biennials Prospect.3: Notes for Now (2014), Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial (2013), and El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files (2011). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Other recent solo exhibitions of Báez’s work have been presented by The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, OH; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Taller Puertorriqueno, Philadelphia, PA; and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT. Báez is the recipient of many awards: most recently, the Soros Arts Fellowship (2019), the United States Artists Fellowship (2019), the College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2018), the Future Generation Art Prize (2017), the Chiaro Award (2016), and Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors (2011). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of institutions including of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH; Phillip and Tracey Riese Foundation, New York, NY; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; and the Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France.

Exhibitions

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  All That I AM

  All That I AM is an edition series organized by curator Larry Ossei-Mensah in collaboration with Art+Culture Projects that explores contemporary artists’ engagements with the complexities of cultural identity. The fourth installment of this series features Delphine Desane, February James, Tajh Rust, and Vaughn Spann, who all center the human condition and emotion in their work.