The way that paper contracts and has a memory is really important. It’s unlike other things. It’s fragile, but I feel like in its fragility it’s closer to a person’s experience.
Firelei Báez, in “Crossing the Line,” Mixed Greens Gallery, New York, filmed 2013, video, 1:02 minutes, available at vimeo.com/77071303.
Firelei Báez was raised in Dajabón, a city in the Dominican Republic on the border with Haiti, where from a young age she witnessed the stark differences between the two countries. The lush Dominican landscape contrasted with the dried, deforested land across the Dajabón River, which serves as the border.1 For Báez—whose mother is Dominican and father is of Haitian decent—Haiti “remained a mystery,”2 despite her geographical and ancestral proximity. She often looks to the landscape and architecture—the histories and mythologies embedded with them—to explore her own diasporic narrative. As a kind of metaphor for the body, the landscape is a fluid site of memory and possibility.
Firelei Báez has a visceral connection to paper. When beginning a new work, she pours water on paper and allows it to respond. Depending on the climate of the work’s creation, the paper’s character varies; its reaction to humidity or dryness causes it to expand or contract, much the way skin does. For the artist, the relationship between the body and paper is part of her material practice. For her self-portrait series “Can I Pass?” (2011–13), she began each day creating a silhouette, the color of which she matched to her forearm and the shape of which varied with her hair, depending on its style and environmental factors, like humidity. This daily practice confronted historical colorism enacted through racial hierarchy tests—such as the brown paper bag and fan tests—used predominantly by African American and Dominican communities to determine and rank identity based on physical traits.1
María Elena Ortiz, “A Future Yet to Be Unfolded,” in Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, ed. María Elena Ortiz (Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2015), 14–15. ↩︎
There is a futuristic, otherworldly quality to much of Firelei Báez’s work, even when referencing the residue of colonial history and power. To see beyond it and to access the places that we know outside its walls (2015) is a self-portrait that references the artist’s earlier “Can I Pass?” (2011–13) series, only instead of depicting herself in muted skin tones, she’s rendered in neon pinks and greens, decorated with a bursting prism of light. The artist’s use of fantastical color activates a space “beyond the walls” of persistent structures of oppression. Looking at the history of “surreal mythmaking of the New World” by seventeenth-century Dutch colonists, whose imagery of the Americas—one of “cannibals, vampires, and unicorns”—shaped a narrative of otherness,1 Báez’s supernatural figures offer alternative representations. She directly references the mythological Ciguapa, a female trickster in Dominican folklore whose changeable appearance the artist projects upon as “a radical, fluid, and active site, standing outside the typologies outlined by Western colonization.”2
Firelei Báez, in “Art Talk: Firelei Báez in Conversation with María Elena Ortiz,” Pérez Art Museum, Miami, October 15, 2015 (posted November 12, 2015), video, 50:43 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=-ko004S8Kv8. ↩︎
María Elena Ortiz, “A Future Yet to Be Unfolded,” in Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, ed. María Elena Ortiz (Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2015), 17. ↩︎
Inspired by the history of eighteenth-century sumptuary “tignon laws” in New Orleans, which dictated that all women of African descent wear a knotted headdress as a mark of inferiority, Firelei Báez’s trompe l’oeil portrayal of a lavishly patterned headscarf in DREAMer (a demand for opacity that weaves no boundaries) (2017) embodies a narrative of resistance and cultural hybridity. The headdress, though required by law, became a fashion piece—a mode of adornment that subverted its oppressive attempt to maintain social hierarchies by keeping Black women from dressing elegantly. Its powerful symbolism here is further articulated in Báez’s patterning. Vines of indigo flowers surround panthers and raised fists—icons of the 1960s civil rights and Black Power movements in the United States. The fists double as azabaches, small gemstones carved in the shape of fists and worn as protective charms in some Latin American cultures.1 Báez also borrowed from her study of Persian textiles, in which patterns along the edge of a work are expressions of style unbound by cultural rules; here, these traditionally marginal figures are shifted to the center of the work.2
Firelei Báez, in “Art Talk: Firelei Báez in Conversation with María Elena Ortiz,” Pérez Art Museum, Miami, October 15, 2015 (posted November 12, 2015), video, 50:43 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=-ko004S8Kv8. ↩︎
María Elena Ortiz, “A Future Yet to Be Unfolded,” in Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, ed. María Elena Ortiz (Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2015), 14. ↩︎
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