A new exhibit has opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston featuring a survey of the work of artist Firelei Báez with 40 pieces of her striking work on display. This is the first museum survey dedicated to her work with the exhibit spanning 20 years of her career. 

At a recent press preview Báez spoke about her art, in particular an installation called “A Drexcyen Chronocommons (To win the war you fought in sideways)” created in 2019. When the viewer walks into the gallery containing this piece they are transported to a mythical world. The walls and ceilings of the gallery are shrouded in blue tarpaulin which is full of holes allowing pinpricks of light that cast dappled shadows across the floor and on the people walking through the gallery. Two large paintings of female figures with emotion-filled eyes that follow the viewer through the gallery hang on opposite walls, shrouded by the fabric and verdant foliage. The figures are painted in vivid blue, green, orange, yellow, and pink hues made by pouring paint and allowing it to pool. Well-hidden fans create a gentle breeze that moves the leaves and the tarps making the installation feel as if it is a breathing, living thing. 

Báez explained the sculpture, “The Drexcyen Myth is an epic story built by two Detroit DJs in the nineties, in a time when Detroit was very blighted by the collapse of industrialization and commerce and a drug epidemic in the United States. And what they came up with over a series of nine albums was this storyline of black excellence and ingenuity, in the sense that they started from the point that the history books all agreed on. (Joseph Mallord William) Turner made a painting about it of women and enslaved people being thrown overboard, many times for insurance value. And what they thought of was, what if the women who were pregnant survived and their kids survived and were able to breathe underwater? What kind of thriving society would they build? And what would the joy, the technology, the highs, and lows of that space be and what they built is something that has inspired many visual artists, musicians, poets. There are books written about this, and I’m just one, and a lineage of that, making odes to that space and thinking how, in line with someone like Saidiya Hartman. What is the value of critical fabulation, of building? When we are told that there are no archives to basically mark our history, that we only have our bodies left in that sense, that our bodies are that archive, what is the potential in that? How much can we encompass? There’s actually this wonderful and strange new development in sound and optics, like a slicing of both, where they can recreate a room, quite literally from the echoes within another object. So, like micing the inside of a potato chip bag can give a sense of what the outside room is. I feel like many times the archives, what we’re left with, are like that. That we have to recreate an entire space based on that goes from what’s unstated. And that is what the Drexcyen Myth does for me, that it creates all the nuance that we live, and experience are now aware of, but are not marked and told to us in normative history. All of that to say, this is an environment that is meant to make you feel present and alive and bodily and into your senses. A place to reflect and feel connected to everything around you.”

Báez’s hope that the environment makes people feel present and alive bears fruit as this installation was the highlight of the survey for me. As she spoke more about the meaning behind the piece I was captivated.  Báez continued, “I’m Dominican and Haitian, and there is a point in our history that is in line with everything I said, not very well marked. There was the northern kingdom of Haiti, where there are these gorgeous portraits by the same portrait artists that painted Napoleon, painted King Henri Christophe, and his son. And those versions of those portraits are in, I think, the Harvard archive. You can go see them there. But there are no portraits of his wife and daughters, who were exiled in Italy and had a long odyssey in exile. And so, these are meant to be portraits of the two daughters speaking to each other. And one thing about these portraits is that they. The way the paint, the eyes are painted, they will follow you as you travel across the room. No matter where you are, you’re making direct eye contact. So that is something that, in a lot of my portraits, I grew up in Latin America, where there is a very codified way of looking at the face. There is the legacy of Casta paintings. They’re some of the most beautiful paintings of intermixed marriages, but they are psychologically very violent because they were meant to depict exactly where you were in society according to how mixed you were. So, I always skip all of that. I want to be generous to the viewer, to say, how can you engage with a certain agency in the subject without having the baggage of, like, codifying the width of a smile. And so, I want the eyes to be as active as possible so that when they look at the viewer, you’re seeing and being seen back. It’s an active engagement and not a passive consumption of that.”

When asked about the space evoking religious imagery, Báez responded, “To the idea of the grotto, in the Dominican Republic, or Hispaniola in general, both Haiti and Dominican Republic, have these very holy caves that were used for ceremonial purposes by the Tainos before the contact with the west. There are artifacts and sigils and markers that are in them that are still present. But outside of that human presence, when you go in, they are bio fluorescents. So, you walk into these spaces that have stalactites and stalagmites, and everything is literally glowing. When you interact with the water, when you go into the space, your body will make the space, the organic material, glow around you. This is, in a way, meant to evoke a bit of that. And I grew up in Miami as well. And every time there’s a hurricane, the blue tarp is the one thing that is a marker of either shelter or disaster, sometimes both. And so, as a kid, the wonder of seeing pinpricks through that tarp was always something that I was drawn to. And so, this is a mix here of both those environments. What does it mean to be in places that were holy but were conscripted or taken for some other purpose. And to be in a hurricane in a place of hurricanes and to feel safe within a hurricane is something that is also a mess.”

Another work spoken of at the press preview was called, “Once We’ve Torn Shit Down, We Will Inevitably See More and See Differently and Feel a New Sense of Wanting and Being and Becoming.”  When asked about the large painted arch, tilted at an impossible angle, curator Eva Respini said “To me, that title really sums up a lot about what the work is trying to do, which is to question how we receive history and power, how histories have been told, specifically the histories of the Atlantic Basin and thinking about the Caribbean and the African Diaspora and its long sort of trenches and tentacles, and how those various images and iconography that are swirling around in Firelei’s head from those kind of cultural touchstones, how those are then iterated through variety of different artworks that you’ll see… It really illustrates how Firelei, who is trained as a painter, really thinks through the medium of painting, how she has jumped off the canvas to think in three dimensions. And even those canvases that are traditional in two dimensions have this feeling, as of enveloping the viewer in these various worlds.”

There were other striking pieces in the exhibit such as “[Title TBC NEW MAP Painting] which was completed so recently that curator Eva Respini joked that it arrived at the museum still wet. Other notable pieces were “Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waning” which is a space behind a curtain with mirrors lined up to infinitely reflect two of Báez’s paintings, to the large, vibrant, floor-to-ceiling mural facing the Boston Harbor. Firelei Báez made a strong showing at the ICA and is poised to become a very important artist with her messages about colonialism and her challenging of the notions of received histories. 
The exhibit will be on display at the ICA from April 4th until September 2, 2024. Link: https://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/firelei-baez-0/