Firelei Báez

About

Firelei Báez is a Dominican-born multimedia artist known for her paintings, drawings, and installations that explore African diasporic histories, colonial legacies, and fluid identities. Born to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, she grew up on the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, experiencing tensions of race, ethnicity, and class. At age eight or nine, she moved to Miami, later relocating to New York to study art, finding solace in art as a tool for healing and transformation amid feelings of displacement. Báez earned a BFA from Cooper Union (2004) and an MFA from Hunter College (2010), with residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2008). Her work reimagines historical maps, folklore, and botanical motifs with vibrant colors and shape-shifting figures, disrupting dominant narratives of the Caribbean and African diaspora to assert agency and resistance.

Afro-Surrealism, blending vibrant abstraction, figuration, folklore, and colonial imagery to explore fluid diasporic identities