Firelei Báez

Untitled (Southern Building)

2023
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
250.2 x 320 cm / 98 1/2 x 126 in

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Firelei Báez’s paintings, sculptures and installations encapsulate both social history and distinctive memory while experiencing the present-day world at large. The work not only redirects the conceptual qualities of both beauty and perception towards the mythologized feminine body of the folkloric ciguapa, but it also captures and contorts centuries of Westernized categorization and cartographic knowledge.

Untitled (Southern Building) (2023) follows within the same framework, deriving its influence from pop culture references and American politics. Báez introduces the viewer to Buffie the Body, widely known as one of the most recognizable video vixens from the early 2000s, as a central figure at the forefront of music television iconography. The rising celebrity status formed around the femme representation in hip-hop was built upon marketable sex appeal and embodied power.

The Buffie-esque figure sits atop the floor plan depicting FDR’s New Deal-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) building. The WPA’s ‘Federal Project Number One’ was one of its most notable programs, employing musicians, writers, artists, actors and directors to lead many of the influential conversations on culture, ingenuity and oral history. Just as Buffie seized the opportunity to infiltrate a male-dominated genre, the WPA's Federal Project Number One reimagined success and liberation for creatives, women and people of color.

Báez artistic acumen expertly melds these narratives with one final stroke of the brush.

I Consider Myself a Filter | Louisiana Channel

Firelei Báez shares a closer look into her artworks and practice with Louisiana Channel. Through vibrant colors and repurposed found maps, Báez explores themes of memory and history with references to her Caribbean origin.

About the artist

New York-based artist Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plantlife, folkloric and literary references, and wide- ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, Baez’s portraits incorporate the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. These empowered figures’ eyes most often engage directly with the viewer, asserting individuality and agency within their states of flux.

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