The full title of this excellent review by Anna Sansom (ARTnet) is “’There is so much more to see if we are brave enough’: Firelei Báez on mining memory, myth, and colonial archives.” Sansom writes about Báez’s first European exhibition, presently on view in Denmark. [Also see previous post Firelei Báez paints away the world’s borders.
When Firelei Báez was a visual arts fellow at the American Academy in Rome (2021-22), she went on a trip to Puglia, where she had a powerful dream. The Dominican Republic-born, Brooklyn-based artist recalls waking up with “almost happy” tears. “It was a dream of being moored at sea and this feathered creature, which seemed very ancient and that I can never figure out how to properly depict, was essentially rescuing me with expanded wings, [saying] ‘I will never abandon you at sea again’,” the artist said. “The reason that I woke up with happy tears was because the dream didn’t seem directed at me but at all my ancestors who crossed the Atlantic Ocean willingly and unwillingly.”
The poignant memory inspired a painting, A taxonomy for tenderness (Carte figurative et approximative représentant pour l’année 1858 les émigrants du globe) (2023), which is on view in Báez’s first European exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark (“Trust Memory Over History”, through February 18, 2024). The entrancing artwork features two intertwined chimera figures, one festooned in scarlet feathers, the other in dark blue plumage, both with human feet and coiled, birdlike heads.
The painting is rich in cultural references. The sense of vibration conveys murmurations of birds, while the vivid colors bring to mind artists like Gustav Klimt. “I was looking at the work of Giacomo Balla, Klimt, and Hilma af Klint, and thinking about how color almost becomes a way of depicting an interiority that is so boundless that it can become the cosmos, and so sensuous that it’s all encompassing,” Báez explained.
The feathers allude to the manto Tupinambá, a ceremonial cape woven with red ibis feathers that was made by Brazil’s Tupinambá Indigenous people. There are believed to be only 11 such mantles in the world, all of which are in European museums, having been taken during the colonial era.
The National Museum of Denmark decided earlier this year to donate one of its five capes to the National Museum of Brazil, following a request from Tupinambá leaders and the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. Báez excitedly recounted this repatriation, and how the cape had been portrayed in western art. “If you think of Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride (1940), you almost see his configuration of an original 15th-century illustration,” she said.
There’s something disquieting about the work, too. Báez, who often refers to colonial archives, painted over a reproduction of a map dating from 1858, a decade after the abolition of slavery in France. It included color codes indicating the countries from which emigrants had departed. “This map is meant to be very scientific and factual, but it has one big glaring omission: my whole island of Hispaniola is outright missing from it,” Báez lamented.
Born in 1981 in the city of Santiago de los Caballeros, Báez moved with her family to Miami as a child. She attained an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from Cooper Union. In the last few years, she has had a solo show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, exhibited a monumental installation at Boston’s ICA Watershed, been nominated for the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize awarded by Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk Foundation, and participated in the Berlin Biennale in 2018 and the Venice Biennale in 2022. This fall, she joined the gallery Hauser & Wirth.
It was in Berlin that Báez’s work attracted the attention of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Germany’s Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Her wall installation, Those who would douse it (it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes you does not mean I relinquish it) (2018), consisted of book pages sourced from archival material on which she made intricate miniature paintings. Several colonial maps were adorned with hybrid creatures merging elements of femininity, flora and fauna. The Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg acquired the piece and will host the Louisiana show from June 22, 2024, through September 29, 2024.
“Báez’s artistic realm thrives on opposites and ambiguities, intertwining beauty with violence, personal perspectives with grand historical narratives and Caribbean mythology with science fiction,” said Mathias Ussing Seeberg, who curated the exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. “Rather than replacing truth with fiction or maps with myth, her work advocates for a multi-layered complexity of fictions that collectively shape our world.”
Another recurring subject in this show is the Ciguapa. Growing up, Báez would listen, enraptured, to her grandmother and mother telling stories about the mythical figure that represents a fusion of human, animal, and plant characteristics. Works such as Years of holding your tongue (2018) and How to slip out of your body quietly (2018) depict bodies sprouting palm trees and covered in twisted buns of straightened black hair.
“One of the things that I loved about that myth was that the Ciguapa’s feet were backwards; if you followed her footsteps, you were going in the wrong direction,” Báez recollected. “I think of the myths as psychic safeguards, little trapdoors or escape routes for how to navigate the world.” [. . .]
For full review article and more artwork, see https://news.artnet.com/art-world/firelei-baez-memory-2366610
[Photo by Sean Hanley: Firelei Báez in her studio, 2023.]
The full title of this excellent review by Anna Sansom (ARTnet) is “’There is so much more to see if we are brave enough’: Firelei Báez on mining memory, myth, and colonial archives.” Sansom writes about Báez’s first European exhibition, presently on view in Denmark. [Also see previous post Firelei Báez paints away the world’s
