Firelei Báez
Nov 15, 2025 - May 31, 2026
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
About the Exhibition
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.
About the Artist
Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent. Her upbringing between Hispaniola’s two countries, which have a longstanding history of tension predicated on ethnic difference, informs her concerns with the politics of place and heritage. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Related Content
Firelei Báez speaks about her practice in this video produced by the MCA.
Funding
Major support for Firelei Báez is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This project is supported in part by Karen and Brian Conway, David and Jocelyne DeNunzio, Mathieu O. Gaulin, The Kotzubei-Beckmann Family Philanthropic Fund, Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, and an anonymous donor.
Lead support for Firelei Báez at MCA Chicago is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, the Zell Family Foundation, Cari and Michael Sacks, and R. H. Defares.
Major support is provided by Laura and Tony Davis and Linden Capital Partners, Newcity, Robin Loewenberg Tebbe and Mark Tebbe, and Charlotte R. Cramer Wagner and Herbert S. Wagner III of Wagner Foundation.
Generous support is provided by Nickol and Darrel Hackett, Hauser & Wirth, the Margot and W. George Greig Ascendant Artist Fund.
This exhibition is supported by the MCA’s Women Artists Initiative, a philanthropic commitment to further equity across gender lines and promote the work and ideas of women artists.
