Firelei Báez
(1981)
Date:
2024
Medium:
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas

Firelei Báez’s works intertwine myth and history, exploring themes of resilience and the enduring scars of colonialism. These two paintings center the ciguapa, a mythological female trickster figure from Dominican folklore, symbolizing the Caribbean’s complex history as a site of colonial violence and cultural richness.

In Convex (recalibrating a blind spot), Báez paints a ciguapa over a diagram of a sugar refinery in New Orleans, Louisiana. The architectural image conceals the function of the building as a place of resource extraction and exploitation, but Baez reconnects it to the enslaved people forced to work there by adding cascading blue water, a reference to the “Middle Passage,” the perilous transatlantic shipping route of the slave trade.

Private Collection BMA