Firelei Baez

Firelei Báez
Born	1981 (1981) Santiago de los Caballeros, D.R..
Nationality	American
Education	Miami Jackson High School
Alma mater	The Cooper Union Hunter College
Known for	Future Generation Art Prize

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.

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 and at Pérez Art Museum Miami. In 2016 and 2017 she will participate in group and solo museum exhibitions at the Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg, 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.

She has held residencies at The Headlands, The Joan Mitchell Center, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Lower East Side Print Shop, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace. Baez’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, New York, 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.^[1]

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. ^[2]

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.”^[3]

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 will remain on view through March 2016. The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor. ^[4]

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.^[5] 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.

Grants, Awards, and Residencies

• 2017: New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Public Art Commission, 163rd Street Subway Station, New York, NY
• 2017: Future Generations Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Foundation, Kiev, Ukraine Rome Prize (shortlist), Rome, Italy http://www.futuregenerationartprize.org/en
• 2016: Chiaro Award, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA^[6]
• 2014: The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting^[7][8]
• 2013: Fine Arts Work Center, Artist in Residence, Provincetown,MA
• 2013: Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist in Residence, Sausalito, CA
• 2013: Donné Paper Mill, Workspace Artist in Residence, New York,NY
• 2013: Wave Hill, Workspace Artist in Residence, New York, NY
• 2012: AIM, Artist in the Marketplace, Bronx Museum,NY
• 2012: Keyholder Residency, Lower East Side Print Shop, New York, NY
• 2011: Workspace Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY
• 2010: Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant^[9]
• 2008: Skowhegan School Of Painting and Sculpture, Full Fellowship, Skowhegan, ME
• 2007: Bronx Recognizes its Own (BRIO) Award Recipient, Bronx, NY
• 2007: Aljira Emerge, A Career Management and Exhibition Program for Emerging Artists
• 2004: The Jaque and Natasha Gelman Award for Painting, New York, NY
• 2003: The O'Brien Travel Award, Cooper Union, New York, NY
• 2002: William Randolph Hearst Award, Cooper Union, New York, NY

Collections

• BNY Mellon Art Collection, Pittsburgh, PA ^[10]
• The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH
• Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola ^[11]
• Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL
• Phillip and Tracey Riese Foundation, New York, NY
• The Jean-Marc Salomon Foundation for Contemporary Art, Annecy, France
• San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
• Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
• The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
• Tiroche DeLeon Collection, Jaffa, Israel
• Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, NY

^[12]https://www.gallerywendinorris.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Firelei-Baez-CV_May-2017.pdf

Selected solo exhibitions

• 2018: Firelei Báez, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH^[13]

• 2017: Firelei Báez, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO^[14]
• 2017: Vessels of Genealogies, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL^[15]
• 2017: Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburg,PA^[16]

• 2016: Vessels of Genealogies, Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University,Charleston, IL^[17]
• 2016: Unpacking Hispañola, with Scherezade Garcia, Taller Puertorriqueño, Philadelphia, PA^[18]
• 2016: Trust Memory Over History, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, CA^[19]

• 2015: Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, Perez Art Museum of Miami, curated by María Elena Ortiz, Miami, FL^[20]
• 2015: Firelei Báez: Patterns of Resistance, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT^[21]

• 2013: Appendix to a Memory Table, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica,CA 2012^[22]
• 2013: Not Even Unalterable Limitations, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica,CA^[23]
• 2013: Psycho*Pomp, Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, NV

Publications

Firelei Báez: Bloodlines | Publisher: Perez Art Museum; First edition. edition (January 1, 2015) | ISBN 0989854671

References