“My works are speculative propositions, meant to create alternate pasts and potential futures, questioning history and culture in order to provide a space for reassessing the present.”
The quote is from Firelei Báez, a Dominican-American artist whose recent paintings and installations are circulating the globe in two expansive exhibitions. Earlier this year, I was fortunate to be in Denmark while one of the shows, Trust Memory Over History, was being featured at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In one room after another, large-scale paintings of mythic figures, personifications, pulsating still lifes and augmented maps hung on the walls. Each bore the mark of an artist in her prime. Returning to Boston, I encountered the second exhibition, Firelei Báez, at the ICA and was amazed to find an entirely separate body of work of the same size, quality and depth. The combined shows represent ten years of Báez’s prodigious output that corrects white, Eurocentric history by annotating it with the beliefs, lives, customs and perspectives of peoples who were swept up in its global expansion.
Báez is an apt storyteller whose ability as a painter can hold visitor attention to her varied iconography and extended, multilingual titles. She informs viewers of her heritage as a Dominican woman, of philosophy born from the oppression of Afro-Caribbeans, of voyages of African slaves and of worldviews shared by non-Europeans. Then, with surprising deftness, she binds all of it into an ever-present history from which no one is exempt. To follow is an overview of a portion of Báez’s paintings and installations from her exhibitions in Denmark and Boston. Whether at the ICA or elsewhere, seeing her work is an imperative for its artistry and intelligence. Its timing is also relevant, for as Americans we live in a country in which the lives of people of color are excluded from schoolroom history so as not to upset white students, and politicians secure popularity by questioning the racial heritage of their opponents.
Untitled (Map of Greenland’s west coast, 3 degrees south of the colony and 2 degrees north of the colony; year 1724, explored by Hans Egede, missionary), 2023, acrylic and mica on digital print transferred to vinyl, 180" x 268"
A cresting wave 10 feet high and 22 feet across greeted visitors as they entered Báez’s exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Rising from a storm, the behemoth churned sand and displaced everything in its path from a settled state. Behind it, an even larger wave loomed with the suggestion that the cycle of destruction and generation would never cease. This was Báez’s painting Untitled (Map of Greenland’s west coast, 3 degrees south of the colony and 2 degrees north of the colony; year 1724, explored by Hans Egede, missionary). She created the work from acrylic paint and mica laid on top of a crude eighteenth-century map of Greenland. Though beautiful, it captured the violence of the sea and of colonial history. The Hans Egede referenced in the work’s title was a Danish explorer and missionary who, with his wife, set out from Europe to convert the Inuit of current-day Greenland to Christianity. By their own criteria they were successful, and in the 1730s Egede proudly demonstrated that point by bringing a converted Inuit child with him to Europe to impress his mission’s funders. When Egede returned Greenland a few years later, he inadvertently introduced to the continent smallpox, to which the Inuit had no immunity. The result was catastrophic.
On her approach to creating this painting and others Báez states “I think if I just gave violence it’s very easy to just look away. That is our biggest power at the moment: who do we give our attention to?” In the immense wave of Untitled, the artist addresses a known fact of European colonization but adds to it the lesser-known story of the Inuit, which still churns. Today Greenland is nearly 90% Inuit yet Egede remains a national saint. This ongoing tension is evident in the number of statues of Egede that dot the continent and the frequency with which Decolonize now! is spray painted across their plinths.
Black quantum physicists (Duppy for Delacroix), 2023, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas, 71 1/8" x 71 1/8"
Historical persistence is a strong theme in Báez’s work. To vary its framework she draws from a vast number of disciplines such as science, history, biography and oral tradition. In one painting she successfully merges Afro-Caribbean folklore with quantum physics, a tenet of which is that information from the past is conserved and continuously ripples through time. In Black quantum physicists, Báez has painted a looming spirit onto an eighteenth-century map that a French perfumier had resurrected in 1935 to promote its long history as a purveyor of exotic scents to Europeans. At the bottom of the map, the company’s reliance on French-colonial slave labor is betrayed by the figure of a white man lording over two Black women as they gather berries to be processed into perfume.
The spirit Báez includes is a duppy, which to many Caribbeans and Africans is a spirit, often of a dead person, that roams the earth for malevolent or benevolent purposes. Here it descends and looks compassionately at the two enslaved women, perhaps as an ancestor who had been condemned to the same fate of forced labor. By bringing attention to an inhumanity that was a decorative element in the original map, Báez disrupts the perfumier’s message of luxury and places the origin of its ongoing success into high relief. The main title Báez has assigned to the painting alludes to the lingering Black experience of European imperialism, which dominant white culture would rather minimize or forget. Her subtitle, in the meantime, wishes the malevolent force of a duppy on systems that erase people of color as autonomous humans, a feat that French artist Eugene Delacroix performed in his nineteenth-century misrepresentations of Moroccans and Algerians.
A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), 2019, two paintings, hand-painted wooden frame, perforated tarp, printed mesh, handmade paper over found objects, plants and books, 373 1/4" × 447 1/8" × 157 1/8"
Báez expresses a three-dimensional relationship between past and present in a contemplative installation titled A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), which is now at the ICA. The word Drexcyen is from a fable that the Black American music group Drexciya had developed to root their name in history. In it Drexciya is a suboceanic city inhabited by the water-breathing descendants of pregnant African women who were – in reality – thrown from slave ships during forced passage to the Americas. While addressing a historical fact forced onto African women, the fable’s element of perseverance gives them ultimate victory over their white captors. The women are remembered and in that sense they still live.
A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), Detail: Towards an unseen force, 2019, acrylic and oil on canvas, 83 1/2” x 47” x 2 3/4”
Passing through either of two portals to Báez’s A Drexcyen chronocommons, visitors enter a vast space of dappled light defined by ceiling and wall suspensions of perforated blue tarp and printed white mesh. The environment is calming in its conveyance of the amorphous qualities of both subsurface water and a starry night sky. Near the installation’s center, hanging opposite one another, are two paintings of Black women wearing tignons, head coverings that eighteenth-century women of color were legally required to wear in New Orleans. The women’s eyes are observant but their faces are rendered without mouths, thus they remain solemnly mute. These are the Drexcyens, women whose stories cannot be told but whose lives extend into the present. Above them is an undulating blue tarp, into which Báez has cut a chart of stars that hovered over Hispaniola on August 21, 1791, when the island’s slaves began a five-year revolt against the French colonial government. Victorious, they established the nation of Haiti.
This blue container of water, air and light combines history and memory into a living story. Haiti and the stars are still here and poignantly attached to them are the lives of countless Africans who died in the anonymity of the sea. There is a terrible beauty to Báez’s installation, a racial narrative that we willingly or unwillingly carry with us by dint of ancestry and shared space.
Untitled (Les tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes), 2022, oil, acrylic and inkjet on canvas, 105" x 82"
Báez is masterful in balancing tensions in her work. When they break, though, furor comes to the surface. Two examples of this at the ICA are her paintings Untitled (Les tables de géographie réduites en un jeu de cartes) and Fruta fina, fruta estraña (Lee Monument). Untitled she began in 2022 while living in Rome during an artist residency. In that city’s public art, and in Italian art generally, horses are depicted as beasts that have been tamed to serve the will of high-ranking humans and gods. In Untitled, however, they stampede across the canvas with a ferocity that nearly obliterates an image beneath them. Looking closely, the viewer finds traces of a sheet of 52 playing cards that had been designed in seventeenth-century Europe as a lark to commemorate the kings, queens and explorers who had colonized Africa, Asia and the Americas. A fact omitted from the playing deck is that the same people had killed and enslaved millions of the continents’ indigenous peoples and disrupted entire civilizations. Therefrom comes the explosive energy of Báez’s horses, which she imbues with apocryphal beauty.
Fruta Fina, Fruta Estraña (Lee Monument), 2022, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas, 88 1/4" x 111"
The other ICA painting, Fruta fina, fruta estraña, references Strange Fruit, a song about lynching that Black American singer Billie Holiday made famous by her 1939 recording of it. The song’s opening verse is “Southern trees bear a strange fruit / blood on the leaves and blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze / strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” Here Báez paints atop an 1885 architectural plan for a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Seemingly eating away at the plan is a mass of plant life and hair buns. The latter alludes to people of color throughout the Americas who for centuries have tried to conform to white expectations by forcing their own hair into foreign straightness. The mass is deadly yet generative: it evokes the monumentality of oppression and the historical persistence of people of color who have - and have not - survived it.
On her ability to depict the terrible and the lush, the repulsive and the attractive Báez states, “I’m fully capable of making a juicy, beautiful painting that is just all pleasure. And that’s good. But that only sustains for a short period of time. I’m interested in giving something that is generous enough to make it linger in your mind afterwards.”
The degree to which Báez can incorporate concepts into her work reaches a crescendo in a painting and an installation at the ICA. The concept presented here is opacity, a mode of being developed by the late intellectual Édouard Glissant. Born in Martinique, Glissant produced a monumental body of work that addresses colonialism and racism, and that proposes a means by which human diversity can flourish in peace. Opacity is Glissant’s call for all people to control what others know about them and simply accept everyone as inherently equal. His thinking is a direct attack on Western hierarchies based on perceived human differences and the oppressive superior/inferior dynamics that flow from them. "I reclaim for all,” Glissant wrote, “the right to opacity, which is not confinement. Let it be a celebration.”
Madeleine (Rupture rapture maroonage), 2022, oil and acrylic on canvas panel, 113 1/2" x 78"
At the ICA Báez addresses opacity in her painting Madeleine (Rupture rapture maroonage), which uses as a baseline an 1800 portrait of a Black woman painted by French artist Marie-Guillemine Benoit. In the original, Madeleine wears a white head wrap that conceals her hair as she sits silently with one of her breasts exposed. People normally view her as an object that they can understand, like or dislike based on her attributes. Báez disrupts this process In her re-treatment of Madeleine, however, by cropping out the subject’s body and covering her face with an opaque burst of yellow, orange and purple paint. It seems to emanate from Madeleine herself and leaves only a portion of her now-lavender head scarf visible. Gone are all references to her color, her countenance, her thoughts – everything that could be used in judgment for or against her. Remaining is the impression of a person whose opacity has reduced her (or elevated her) to the status of simply human.
Báez brings opacity to a multidimensional level with her installation Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities). Stepping through its single portal, viewers enter a 14' x 24' x 10' room lined with mirrors that cast infinite reflections of itself and anything inside it. The ends are flanked by two paintings similar to Madeleine. They are Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waning and Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing, both with figures that Báez has obscured with bursts of color. When visitors enter the installation, they do so with a great deal of self-knowledge and a related battery of comforting and disquieting opinions about themselves., all of which get amplified by the mirrors. While I watched people navigate the space, many with eyes to the floor, it became evident that they were having an easier time looking at images of Báez’s concealed portraits than of themselves. Comfort and acceptance came when the details of self were unknown.
The visitor experience of Adjusting the Moon, the ICA states, links Glissant’s philosophy of opacity with the ongoing history of Black people and other people of color who control over dominant cultures know about them so they can sidestep opinion and navigate space more freely.
Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities), mirrored room with two paintings, approximately 14' x 24' x 10’. Detail: Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waning, 2020, oil and acrylic on panel, 114” x 117”
Báez takes a considerable risk in making public a body of work that builds history from the biographies, beliefs and traditions of people who once had limited or no contact with each other. History is a tangle of causes and effects that accumulate over time. European colonialism, for instance, was not something that flared up and burned itself out; today it ripples through everything from the languages we speak to the food we eat, from the mates we choose to the wars we wage. The effects of colonialism is in our DNA. How, then, can an artist tell the stories of Caribbeans, Africans and indigenous peoples but not lock them into the past or have them construed as “other” by viewers? Báez tackles the question repeatedly in her work, but two paintings in particular bind her stories and corrected histories into one persistent whole.
In Tone tonal time (or an economy of care) at the ICA, she uses as her base a reproduction of a seventeenth-century, multilingual map that charts Earth’s 32 pervasive wind directions. Painted on top of it are a still life of abundance to the West and an anonymous female figure to the East. The two are independent of one another, as though from different worlds, except toward the middle of the map. There they become an inseparable blur, seemingly locked together in a yin/yang of consumption and production, enjoyment and toil. It is the dynamic of colonialism and slavery, of capital markets and international consumerism. Standing before the painting, viewers might be hard pressed to consider themselves as occupying some magic space outside of that dynamic.
Tone tonal time (or an economy of care), 2024, oil, acrylic and inkjet on canvas, 88" × 110"
In Denmark, Báez expressed the concept of human interrelatedness through her work Untitled (Transito de la sombra y penumbra de la Luna sobre la superficie de la Tierra). Here she painted in nature’s cool and warm tones a female figure resting across a crude map of the Western Hemisphere. The map was drawn in 1778 by Mexican astronomer Antonio de Leon y Gama to plot the cross-continental course of a solar eclipse that had occurred that year. Báez’s figure stretches along the same path, from Africa, to the Caribbean and on to the western shore of present-day Mexico and California. This natural line of cast darkness also traces the spread of European colonialism. Unlike an eclipse’s linear, east-to-west path affecting one geolocation at a time, Báez’s figure has no compass direction or movement; its stillness unites points on the globe into a single time and space.
Untitled (Transito de la sombra y penumbra de la luna sobre la superficie de la tierra), 2021, oil and acrylic on printed canvas, 78 1/2" x 114 3/8"
The philosophical point Báez makes here is immense, for it defies the white European notion of history as the unidirectional, westward movement of its own people and culture. History is not such an exclusive domain. It is the back-and-forth movement of all people; we rise and fall unevenly but in unison. As suggested by the sand in Báez’s painting of endless waves, time churns everything in its path into one complex story.
All of us are in it. Now.
Jim Kiely
ICA Boston’s Firelei Báez exhibition Firelei Báez will be on view through September 2, 2024. A separate exhibition of her work, titled Trust Memory Over History, closed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and is currently on view at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany.