A joyful rebellion in the works of Firelei Báez at the Vancouver Art Gallery

Currently on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery is an impressive, must-see survey exhibition dedicated to artist Firelei Báez. Curated by Eva Respini, Deputy Director & Director of Curatorial Programs, the exhibition brings together over two dozen paintings, drawings, sculpture, and immersive installations, spanning the artist’s career to-date of nearly twenty years. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, where Respini was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator prior to joining the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2023, the exhibition marks the artist’s Canadian premier as well as an exciting feat for the gallery.  

Báez’s work explores the influences of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, engaging with histories of colonialism and imperialism around the Atlantic Basin and beyond. She often builds on top of found historical documents like maps and architectural drawings, adding fantastical figures or abstract bursts of colour. She draws on a diverse range of subjects, including mythology, folklore, and science fiction, to reimagine colonial histories for the present and future.

• “She’s a storyteller, she's a historian, and she’s a time-traveller”, began Respini on a tour of the exhibition with the artist. Throughout the tour, Respini described Báez as “an artist in a class of her own”,  “a virtuosic painter”, “a painter with a capital P”, and “an excellent draftsperson” — traits that are evident as you walk through the exhibition.

While striking and attractive from the works’ sheer monumental scale and exuberant colours, it is through slow-looking that the artist brings us into her complex, multilayered, and imaginative world.

The New York-based artist was born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent. At age eight, Báez moved to Miami then eventually to New York, where she studied at Cooper Union’s School of Art. Much of her work is influenced by her upbringing along the border between Hispaniola’s two neighbouring countries with a history of tension largely stemming from ethnic divide. Báez explains that growing up between the Caribbean, Miami, and New York, she was very aware of race. Her work investigates race, gender, and identity, and challenges traditional representations of them. 

One of the first works you encounter is in the gallery’s rotunda. It is a sculptural installation, an archway painted in trompe l’oeuil style to emulate an architectural ruin with its patterned surface faded and peeling. Titled (once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming) (2014), the work is modelled after the Palace of Sans-Souci in Milot, Haiti, built in 1813 after the Haitian Revolution for the first king of Haiti.

The artist invites viewers to walk through the sculpture, serving as a portal into the rest of the exhibition. Báez said of the work, “I wanted a space where you could be a part of the painting. You are welcome to lightly hold that sculpture as you walk through and be held by it at the same time.”  

Báez’s practice of painting directly onto historical materials such as maps, charts, architectural diagrams, and books, allows her to layer subject matter from diasporic narratives. An example of these interventions is in Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) (2014–15), an installation consisting of 225 book pages that fill an entire gallery wall. The pages are from books on engineering, cartography, and science that were deaccessioned from the library of Cooper Union, where Báez studied. Painted directly on top of the worn pages are figures, flora, patterns, and folkloric motifs, all painted delicately and intricately, with the precision of scientific drawing.

In adding to these pages, Respini suggested, “Báez underscores that history is not fixed. History is fluid. She gives multiple perspectives where sometimes history has only given a single perspective.” The artist again invites the viewer to be a part of the work, to look closely thereby leaving a bit of their breath. Báez said, “Every gesture, whether we acknowledge it or not, is adding to the future.” 

Portals are a motif throughout the exhibition. Walls have been altered so viewers walk through archways to move from room to room; other painted works, like Adjusting the Moon: (the right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing (2019-2020), are framed like an archway, as though the viewer can step right through it.

In A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) (2019), we do literally step into Báez’s artwork. Here Báez further extends what she does with her works on paper and canvas to an experiential installation.

As another interesting layer to the exhibition, the artist responds to the neoclassical architecture of the building itself, a former provincial courthouse. Along the Georgia Street-facing exterior, the artist has created a site-specific banner that simultaneously obscures and adds to the building’s columns. The banner, titled Truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory healing) (2024), depicts a crouching hybrid human-flora figure in vibrant orange and pink hues to the left, with elements of a map behind her, and a cresting wave on the right, crashing toward the centre.

The figure, a ciguapa, is a recurring motif throughout Báez’s work. She is a female trickster character in Dominican folk stories, whose two identifying traits are that her feet are backwards to make her traceless — if you follow her footsteps, you’re going in the wrong direction — and that she has long, lustrous hair. While stories of the ciguapa are told to children to discourage unruly behaviour, Báez embraces it as a symbol of endless possibility.

Báez’s works are deeply layered and complex with an openness that leaves viewers curious to learn more as well as contribute their own experiences and associations to the works. In a fantastic interview from July 2023, Báez says, “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.”

Details

• Firelei Báez is on view from November 3, 2024-March 16, 2025 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street.

• General admission from $29. Admission is free on the first Friday of every month from 4-8 pm. For tickets and more information, visit vanartgallery.bc.ca.

• Gallery hours: Daily from 10 am-5 pm (Fridays from 10 am-8 pm), closed Tuesdays