Firelei Báez’s Paintings Capture the Dominican Diasporic Experience

“These here are little protective hair buns, or Angelitas,” says the Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez during the last days of summer, pointing to a series of sensuous, inky coiled-hair paintings in her Brooklyn studio. “I think of performing self as this very conscious thing. Within culture, we have this idea of dress and adornment as effeminate and powerless, but so much of that is a way of accessing space on your own terms.” Báez gestures around her huge, hyper-organized industrial studio in the Red Hook neighborhood: “There’s still a lot of work in progress and you can see the plant babies everywhere, and all the art supplies.” She recounts a whirlwind move to the tropical foliage and flower-filled studio during the pandemic, right before her six-month American Academy visual arts fellowship in Italy, as recipient of a Philip Guston Rome Prize. “Everything is categorized by kind and mediums, the inks, the paints. You caught me on the very last day before I have to ship these to L.A.,” she says, referring to her debut with the mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, which she joined late last year. Her show, titled The fact that it amazes me doesn’t mean that I relinquish it, opened in September and is on view through January 5 at the gallery’s flagship in the downtown arts district in Los Angeles.

Taking a generous sip of coffee, she confesses to pulling all-nighters in preparation for the show. It features large-scale canvases, drawings, and her first bronze sculpture—a massive, half-human, arborous woman in the middle of a transformation, her leg extended and wearing a crown of palm fronds that looks whipped by a Caribbean hurricane. “Some of these are paintings that were not finished on time for L.A.,” she says, pointing to some unfinished pieces. “That one will be a spider. This other one also didn’t make it to the show. I have to work on the details, but it’s going to be very fun and lush.”

Báez’s lingua franca is one of recurrent imagery. Water, botanicals, cartography, book pages, and hair reverberate through her practice to reassess the violence of the past, while imagining a better future. “Dominicans are very well known within the Black diaspora for having a lot of hair magic,” says Báez, who, for the last 20 years, has made cerebral artwork that fuses the legacy of colonialism and Afro-Caribbean identity. Glossy, straightened buns are among the motifs she employs to examine Western hegemony and female empowerment. “If you have very kinky hair, they can do an intense blow dry and give it somewhat of a latitude. But before there was a dominance of hairpieces, you would do these little pin curls between events so you could preserve the wave or texture,” she says. “Look at how much conversation there is around Kamala’s silk press. Even at the highest echelon of power, you have this hair performance.”

Báez has been hailed by critics and curators as the kind of visionary that comes along a handful of times a generation. Deeply researched, her paintings often portray fantastical, shape-shifting creatures, akin to the windswept, statuesque bronze on view in Los Angeles. Mining Dominican folklore, the ciguapa, a mythic femme trickster—part-beauty, part monster—reappears as a sign of defiance and autonomy. In some variations, a ciguapa bursts into carnivalesque plumes or flora; others are superimposed on a reproduction of an 18th-century atlas. Famous for her “map paintings,” Báez blows up historical maps and nautical charts, printing them on canvas as background, for her richly saturated compositions. The colonial-era archives provide a metaphor for plotting an alternative course forward. Similarly, Báez paints on yellow-stained pages torn from old library books—whether an engineering manual or a text on Herbert Spencer, the British philosopher and inventor of social Darwinism.

“I was fascinated by books and collected them as a little kid, but we moved around a lot, so I never got to keep my library,” recalls Báez, who earned her MFA from Hunter College in 2011. “Also, my mom was very concerned about me being so introverted and hiding away in books and drawings. She wanted me to be more extroverted. She didn’t realize that it wasn’t going to happen by taking away the books.” Her fascination with reading intensified as an undergraduate art student at Cooper Union. “Their library became a refuge,” Báez says. “It’s such a gorgeous, intricate space. All the science and all the history I could feast my eyes on.”

A longtime favorite among top art collectors, the past year has nonetheless launched Báez into a different level of stardom. Her joining Hauser & Wirth came on the heels of her first major museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), curated by Eva Respini. There was also her first European museum show at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to Germany’s Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg over the summer. And this week, the sweeping ICA exhibition of over 40 works, spanning two decades, including the artist’s installations, opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the largest museum in western Canada. There, a sculptural standout extends the notion of mythmaking to contemporary ideals: A Drexciyan chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) is an immersive, underwater cave of perforated FEMA-blue tarps (evoking post-hurricane relief in the Caribbean), printed mesh, and tropical plants. The piece alludes to the Afrofuturist story—created by Detroit electro duo Drexciya on their 1992 album “Deep Sea Dweller”—of an aquatic kingdom built by fictional descendants of African women who escaped slave ships during the Middle Passage.

Asked about the insight she gleaned from her own midcareer survey, Báez likens her process to music or poetry composition. “I try to think of my practice like a tapestry rather than a linear thread, so there are things that are weaving into a larger conversation,” she says. “I will have 20 paintings going at once, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them will go out. I want to be able to first engage with work in the studio. Have I processed it enough in my body, in my emotions, and in my mind? Even if I don’t have the words, I’ll be able to have a feeling of why it’s good.”