Firelei Báez is a New York-based artist, who deals with identity issues, female power, and ethnic stereotypes. In her works, she uses a character from Dominican folklore and the 18th-century taxonomy to take over the power and envisage a better future.
A Reconstituted Echo (2019) is Báez’s painting that depicts a colorful silhouette of a dancing woman with palm tree leaves and other plants in her head. Its complex layers of patterns and colors suggest fluid cultural identity. In this painting, the mixed human-plants challenge racial and class stratification, especially in scientific racism. The 18th-century science divided the class of humankind based on ethnicity and skin-color. This scientific racism becomes the paradigm of racist thinking and attitude later.
Firelei Báez, “Wanderlust Demanding Recompense”. Courtesy of artist. https://www.fireleibaezstudio.com/gallery
In Wanderlust Demanding Recompense, Báez paints a hairy woman’s legs with a palm tree as half of its body. This drawing is an overturning of Carl Linnaeus’s Homo monstrosus (Monstrous man). Linnaeus associated black and brown bodies with bestiality.
Báez calls the character in her paintings ‘ciguapa’. By this figure, she is asking the viewer “to come to the terms with their own feelings around a woman’s body”. Ciguapa comes from a mythological creature of Dominican folklore. This folklore tells that someone who is lured by Ciguapa will disappear and never be seen again. The normative version of Ciguapa portrays her as hyper-sexual and leads someone in the wrong direction. Báez reverses this version into a figure who highly independent, self-possess, and feels deeply.
Báez offers a new vision to fight against the racist and sexist paradigm, as she said, “I don’t want to create narratives of victimhood. I want to flip it.” Báez’s re-making of Monstrous man and Ciguapa can open the viewer’s mind about the subversive power of beauty to deconstruct unequal world order.
Firelei Báez: An Open Horizon (or) the Stillness of a Wound | Art21 “New York Close Up”
