Firelei BáezSubaltern Histories

artist standing to the right of an artwork
Firelei Báez at her studio in Long Island City, New York, ca. 2017. © antoinebootz. Photo courtesy of Galerie Magazine.

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.

  1. “Firelei Báez in Conversation with Naima J. Keith,” in Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, ed. María Elena Ortiz (Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2015), 22. ↩︎

  2. María Elena Ortiz, “A Future Yet to Be Unfolded,” in Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, ed. María Elena Ortiz (Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2015), 11. ↩︎