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.

(Firelei Báez)

Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Firelei Báez is the first mid-career survey in North America of the multilayered and dynamic work of Firelei Báez. Featuring significant examples of the artist’s drawings, paintings, and installations made over the last two decades, this exhibition underscores the breadth and expertise of one of contemporary art’s most significant voices.

In her monumental paintings and installations, Báez creates fictional worlds that explore the legacies of colonial rule across the Americas and the African diaspora, in the Caribbean, and beyond. Her exuberant, colorful artworks contain complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and abstract gestures alongside symbols rooted in Afro-Caribbean cultures. Drawing on folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and mythology, she often works on top of visual references from the past, such as colonial maps and architectural plans, to challenge our understanding of acknowledged power, suggest alternative histories, and unsettle the often-fixed categories of race, gender, and nationality. Her works are at once fantastical, multilayered, and immersive, inviting viewers into her mythological narratives of struggle and resistance.

Firelei Báez is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and curated by Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Tessa Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator, ICA/Boston. The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s presentation is organized by Carla Acevedo-Yates, former Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, with Cecilia González Godino, former Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow, and Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.