Mennello Museum of American Art

Artist Firelei Báez will present a FREE talk, on the occasion of the Mennello Museum of American Art’s new exhibit IMMERSION INTO COMPOUNDED TIME AND THE PAINTINGS OF FIRELEI BÁEZ.

Please RSVP here.

Báez is best known through her extraordinary paintings of lush landscaped-figures, intricately patterned tignons, and otherworldly bodies with striking eyes. Here, she considers the reality of ones current social and the historic construction of cultural self in America. These complex, intersectional bodies and symbols alongside large-scale portraits are painted in vibrant, swirling colors, which intermingle time and character. For Báez, “identity is malleable, negotiated,” and given strength by the female body and mythology of her being.

IMMERSION INTO COMPOUNDED TIME AND THE PAINTINGS OF FIRELEI BÁEZ is curated by Katherine Navarro, Mennello Museum of American Art. A fully illustrated bilingual catalog on the exhibition has been published, and will be available for purchase and artist signing.

Firelei Báez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic. She earned her BFA at The Cooper Union School of Art in 2004, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, and later earned her MFA at Hunter College in 2010. Báez currently lives and works in New York City. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace. Báez has had solo exhibitions at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, among others. Báez was included in the 2018 Berlin Biennial, the United States Biennial Prospect.3, New Orleans, the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time’s LA>LA exhibition at the Museum of Latin American Art, Los Angeles and at the 2017 Venice Biennale with the Pinchuk Art Foundation’s Future Generation’s Art Prize exhibition. Her work is in the collections of the BNY Mellon Art Collection, Pittsburgh, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Sindika Dokolo Foundation Collection, Luanda, Angola, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Tiroche DeLeon Collection, Jaffa, Isreal. She is currently represented by Kavi Gupta, Chicago and James Cohan, New York.