Enter The Worlds Of Firelei Báez At Institute Of Contemporary Art Boston

Entering a grotto-like space inside the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, visitors find themselves surrounded by what appears to be a blue canvas with small perforations that allow dim light to illuminate the room. Black diasporic symbols of nurturing and resistance are molded into the material.

Above, a star map reminiscent of the night sky at the start of the Haitian Revolution in August 1791. The revolution is the only successful slave revolt in history. It gave rise to the first independent black state in the New World, and after 12 years of struggle, produced the second independent country in the Americas. The United States was the first.

The Haitian revolution would help add fuel to that nation's abolitionist movement.

Why blue canvas?

Disaster zones offer some. Explore any place after a hurricane.

They simultaneously indicate tragedy and refuge. Heaven help you if you ever need a blue tarp for your home or shelter, but here's hoping you can find some if the circumstances call for it.

Firelei Baez, In Drexcyen chronocommons (to win the war you fought it sideways), (2019). Two paintings, a hand-painted wooden frame, a perforated canvas, printed mesh with handmade paper on found objects, plants and books; 373 1/4 × 447 1/8 × 157 1/8 inches.

“The room resembles an underwater world reminiscent of the mythical Drexcians dating back to the horrific transatlantic voyage and middle passage,” said Tessa Bachi Haas, assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, on Forbes.com. “Inside the gallery, there are two paintings whose eyes follow the visitors as they walk through the space, and objects and vegetation hang from the ceiling. This sacred space is multisensory. There is a sound of plants rubbing against each other and against a fan.”

Drexciya: An underwater world populated by the children of pregnant women who jumped or were thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade.

See the installation as part of the ICA's “Firelei Báez,” the museum's first survey dedicated to the artist.

“Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic) is one of the most exciting living artists of her generation,” said Bachi Haas. “She is part of a vital movement in contemporary art that embraces the role of art in understanding gaps in the historical record, imagining new ways of seeing and inviting the public into this process of reimagining and reassessing our past, present and future.”

The artist and art museum as historian and history museum. For Báez, these stories generally involve the Atlantic basin, such as the Middle Passage, with an emphasis on the Caribbean, as in the case of the Haitian revolution. afro caribbean

“Báez's work is about looking at history through multiple lenses: it shifts perspectives and creates layers of complexity where history has only provided a single perspective, one that centers a Western subject who is typically white and male,” explains Bachi Haas. “This unique perspective, which she disrupts, is often a product of colonial rule in the Americas and the African diaspora.”

An example of how Báez changes perspectives and alters is by overpainting colonial maps and 17th century architectural plans.^th until the 20th^th centuries

“In doing so, it challenges our understanding of recognized power and suggests alternative histories,” added Bachi Haas. “Firelei asks, 'whose stories have not been recorded?' Where is its place in the history of art?'”.

Man without a country…, (2014-2015) combines 225 individual book pages into a wall-sized installation. The books covered subjects ranging from architecture, art, and engineering, and many were acquired after being withdrawn from the Cooper Union library.

The ICA exhibition's wall text reads: “Each page is a rumination on the history of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in a global context. The artist uses the pages, many of them dog-eared and slightly worn, as support for his drawings depicting fantastical figures and decorative ornaments.

Art, yes, but how with In Drexcyen chronocommons (to win the war you fought it sideways)something more

“Báez is invested in world-building, expanding the pictorial surface to an architectural and immersive scale,” said Bachi Haas.

The sheer size of Báez's artworks stands out among the 40 pieces exhibited over the last two decades of his career. Big stories that require a big space to tell them. Artwork that typically extends six, seven, eight feet or more on any side.

The exhibition premiered a site-specific mural, The truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory cure) (2024), in the ICA Founder's Gallery overlooking the harbor and responding to Boston's colonial and maritime history.

Báez's lush and colorful paintings feature complex and layered uses of abstract patterns, decorations and gestures alongside symbols rooted in Caribbean culture. The mostly female figures that dominate his paintings are not easily identified as they seem to move between humans, animals and myths. The artist draws on folklore, fantasy, science fiction and mythology to conjure them up.

Women, water, color.

“Ultimately, their intervention process is not one of elimination, but of recalibration,” said Bachi Haas. “Firelei invests in stories that have not been recorded within the Western canon. These include his figures of Ciguapa; stories of Tignon's laws; iconography of the Black Panther movement; the speculative and Afrofuturist space of Drexciya; among others .”

Ciguapa, creatures of Dominican folklore.

The Tignon Laws enacted by Spanish colonial governor Don Estevan Miro of New Orleans in 1786 “…prohibited Creole women of color from showing 'excessive attention to dress' in the streets of New Orleans.”

Notice the two women pictured In Drexcyen chronocommons (to win the war you fought it sideways)the Haitian priestesses – whose contributions to the narrative of the Revolution are often omitted – who wear rags to cover their hair.

Enter the spectacular and fantastical world of “Firelei Báez” at ICA/Boston until September 2, 2024, before the exhibition moves to the Vancouver Art Gallery (November 2, 2024 to March 16, 2025 ) and then at the Des Moines Art Center. (from June 14, 2025 to September 21, 2025).