Firelei Báez's practice is one of radical revision. Across painting, drawing, and installation, she intervenes in the archives of colonial history—maps, charts, botanical illustrations—overlaying them with densely patterned figures and forms drawn from Afro-Caribbean mythology, folklore, and the imagined futures of the diaspora. Born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, in 1980, and based in New York, Báez constructs visual spaces where what has been suppressed or forgotten can coexist with what might yet be. Her work proposes that history is not fixed but fluid, always available for reexamination and reinvention.

Báez's formal education includes an MFA from Hunter College (2010), a BFA from The Cooper Union (2004), and attendance at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008). These foundations have supported a career marked by increasing institutional recognition. In 2024, she became the subject of her first major U.S. survey, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and traveling to the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it remains on view through May 2026. Her work has been featured in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), and in solo exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others.

“I'm interested in creating spaces where things that are not supposed to be together can coexist—where history and fantasy, the personal and the political, the real and the imagined can occupy the same plane.”

— Firelei Báez

Central to Báez's iconography is the figure of the ciguapa, a mythical creature from Dominican folklore with backward-facing feet, symbolizing a resistance to tracking, to being fixed or fully known. This figure appears throughout her work, alongside elaborate depictions of hair that transform into architectural and botanical forms—most powerfully in monumental works like To breathe full and free (2019). Here, hair becomes a site of growth, memory, and identity, sprawling beyond the confines of the body to suggest worlds unto themselves. In Untitled (Ciguapa) (2018), the creature is rendered in Báez's signature deep blues and intricate patterning, emerging from and receding into the pictorial ground.

Recent series such as A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2020) overlay abstract forms onto gridded, map-like structures, questioning linear history and proposing alternative temporalities. The title itself signals Báez's commitment to language as a site of play and resistance. "I'm thinking about the idea of the 'maroon'—the escaped slave who created autonomous communities outside colonial control," she has said. "That spirit of radical self-determination and world-building feels urgent right now." This ethos permeates her practice: the work is not merely about survival but about flourishing, about the creation of new symbolic orders from the materials of the old.

Báez's achievements have been recognized with numerous awards, including the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2020), the Artes Mundi Prize (2021), and the Philip Guston Rome Prize (2021). Her work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Tate, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Yet the work itself resets the terms of this success: it asks not what it means to be included in existing institutions, but what it might mean to imagine institutions otherwise. Báez's paintings and drawings are spaces of possibility, dense with the knowledge of the past and alive to the futures they might help bring into being.

Map of the British Empire in America

2021 · Acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas · 245.9 x 335.8 cm

© Firelei Báez

Le Jeu Du Monde

2020 · Acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas · 266.7 x 334.5 cm

© Firelei Báez · Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle

Marine Hospital

2021 · Acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas · 248.3 x 319.5 cm

© Firelei Báez

Editorial features showcase artistic merit independently. Collector perspectives shared here reflect interest — not a guarantee of network access.

ARTBRIDGE NEXUS COLLECTOR PANEL

" Báez's work operates at the intersection of history and myth with extraordinary sophistication. Map of the British Empire in America is a masterpiece of symbolic density."

— Collector, New York

Board of Trustees, Studio Museum in Harlem

" The way she transforms archival materials into spaces of possibility is breathtaking. Le Jeu Du Monde and Temple of Time feel like windows into alternate histories."

— Collector, Miami

Pérez Art Museum Miami, International Council

" Marine Hospital stopped me cold. Her use of archival printed canvas as ground for painterly intervention is both politically urgent and aesthetically profound."

— Collector, London

Tate Americas Foundation

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Explore more of Firelei Báez's work on her Instagram (@fireleibaez) or through her primary representation: Hauser & Wirth and James Cohan Gallery.