Artists

Firelei Báez is a Dominican-born, New York–based artist whose vibrant paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations reimagine histories of the African diaspora, Caribbean folklore, and colonial legacies. Layering intricate patterns, saturated color, and finely wrought detail over maps, manuals, and historical documents, Báez creates exuberant works that unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality while proposing new mythologies for the future. Her practice draws on anthropology, folklore, fantasy, and science fiction to elevate untold stories and voices often excluded from the Western canon.

Báez, the daughter of a Dominican mother and Haitian father, grew up between Hispaniola’s two nations before emigrating to Miami at age eight. She earned a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Hunter College (2010), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008. Figures from Caribbean folklore, such as the ciguapa, alongside references to tignons in 18th-century New Orleans or Haitian revolutionary monuments, frequently appear in her work, embodying both historical inquiry and speculative imagination.

Her work has been presented in major international exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale (2018), Prospect.3 New Orleans (2014), Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (2017), and the 2017 Venice Biennale’s Future Generation Art Prize exhibition. Recent solo exhibitions include Bloodlines (Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2015), Joy Out of Fire (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2018), and her first North American survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2021).

Báez is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2010), the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting (2015), the Philip Guston Rome Prize (2021), and a Soros Arts Fellowship (2019). Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among others.