Firelei Báez, The Earth That Remains, 2025

Firelei Báez
b. 1980, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic; lives in New York, NY

The Earth That Remains, 2025
Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Promised Gift of Laura and Michael Werner

The Earth That Remains, a new work by Firelei Báez on view at the MCA through May 31, 2026, depicts a ciguapa—a trickster from Dominican folklore—bowing over an architectural plan of the Bonnet Carré Spillway in Louisiana. Under a foreboding sky, her body unfurls into a waterfall that cascades over lush vegetation and into increasingly abstracted marks that reach beyond the edges of the plan. The Bonnet Carré Spillway is a flood control structure that diverts excess water from the Mississippi River into Lake Pontchartrain to protect communities, especially New Orleans, from flooding. Báez’s ciguapa complicates the project’s status as a social good by hinting at what was lost when the spillway was built in 1929. During construction, the US Army Corps of Engineers plowed over two cemeteries of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, resurfacing their bodies and prompting a movement for commemoration led by their descendants.

In the video above, Báez discusses her use of abstraction and figuration against the backdrop of her painting, which will enter the MCA’s permanent collection as a promised gift of Laura and Michael Werner.