Firelei Báez

Artist Firelei Báez graduated from Hunter College with an MFA in 2011. Widely exhibited and collected, her paintings, drawings, and installations draw upon diasporic histories, casting them into an imaginative realm and re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Báez was born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent. Her upbringing between Hispaniola’s two countries, which have a longstanding history of tension predicated on ethnic differences, informs her concerns with the politics of place and heritage. Her work often draws upon a wide range of African diasporic histories, reworking visual imagery from sources such as Dominican folklore, 18th-century taxonomy, and the Black Panther movement. 

In a filmed interview with Florida International University, Báez described her experience in the Hunter MFA program as a “place to let go of the training and hang-ups, and to just create. The program provided a good lesson on how to give myself the freedom to value my own voice. It gave me the space and room to just play and make art.”

In 2024, Báez will be the subject of her first major survey in the United States at the ICA Boston. Her work has been presented in significant international exhibitions, including the inaugural installation at the ICA Watershed in Boston titled To breathe full and free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction (19°36′16.9″N 72°13′07.0″W, 42° 21′48.762″ N 71°1′59.628″ W), and Biennale Arte 2022: The Milk of Dreams at the Venice Biennale. Solo presentations of Báez’s work include exhibitions at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami.