Firelei Báez

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. [3]

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, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the DePaul Art Museum.

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.”[4]

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 remained on view through March 2016. The program was presented in conjunction with the exhibition “The Power of Prints: The Legacy of William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor.[5]

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.[6] 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.

Báez is currently represented by James Cohan Gallery and Kavi Gupta Gallery.

• 2020: Artes Mundi 9 (shortlist), Cardiff, Wales
• 2020: Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Washington, D.C.
• 2020: Recognition, 2019 Public Art Network Year in Review, Americans for the Arts, Washington, D.C.
• 2019: En Plein Air, Highline Art Commission, New York, NY highline.com
• 2019: Soros Arts Fellowship, Open Society Foundations, New York, NY
• 2019: United States Artist 2019 Fellow for Visual Arts, Chicago, IL
• 2018: PES Residency, Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ
• 2018: College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, Los Angeles, CA
• 2018: New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Public Art Commission, 163rd Street Subway Station, New York NY
• 2018: The Modern Window, The Modern Museum of Art, New York, 2018–19
• 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[7]
• 2014: The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting[8][9]
• 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[10]
• 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

• The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Cornell Fine Art Museum, Rollins College, Orlando, FL
• BNY Mellon Art Collection, Pittsburgh, PA [11]
• The Cleveland Clinic Fine Art Collection, Cleveland, OH
• Isabela and Agustín Coppel Collection,
• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
• Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola [12]
• Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, MO
• Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany
• Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC
• Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO
• New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
• Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL
• Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL
• Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH
• 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
• 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
• 21c Museum Hotel, Louisville, KY

• 2020: (Upcoming) Firelei Báez, ICA Watershed, East Boston, MA
• 2019: Immersion into Compounded Time and The Paintings of Firelei Báez, Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL
• 2019: A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), James Cohan, New York, NY
• 2019: Firelei Báez, new work, Witte de With Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands [13]
• 2018: The Modern Window: For Améthyste and Athénaire (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), Anaconas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• 2018: Firelei Báez: Joy Out of Fire, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY
• 2018: 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany [14]
• 2018: Firelei Báez: To See Beyond, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH[15]
• 2017: Firelei Báez: To See Beyond Its Walls (and access the places that lie beyond), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO[16]
• 2017: Firelei Báez: Vessels of Genealogies, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL[17]
• 2017: Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA[18]
• 2016: Vessels of Genealogies, Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL[19]
• 2016: Unpacking Hispañola, with Scherezade Garcia, Taller Puertorriqueño, Philadelphia, PA[20]
• 2016: Trust Memory Over History, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, CA[21]
• 2015: Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, Perez Art Museum of Miami, curated by María Elena Ortiz, Miami, FL[22]
• 2015: Firelei Báez: Patterns of Resistance, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT[23]
• 2013: Appendix to a Memory Table, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica,CA 2012[24]
• 2013: Not Even Unalterable Limitations, Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica,CA[25]
• 2013: Psycho*Pomp, Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, NV

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

Edwards, Stassa. "Firelei Báez's Stunning PAMM Exhibit, 'Bloodlines,' Dissects Complex Racial Identities." Miami New Times, Dec. 1, 2015.

Vogel, Wendy. "Firelei Báez." Art in America, vol. 104, no. 1, Jan. 2016, p. 29.

Aranda-Alvarado, R. "Bodies of Color: Images of Women in the Works of Firelei Báez and Rachelle Mozman." Small Axe, vol. 21 no. 1, 2017, pp. 58–70.

• Studio Visit: Firelei Baez, MoMA Magazine