Firelei Báez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros to Dominican and Haitian parents and lives and works in New York. She makes large scale, intricate works on paper that are intrinsically indebted to a rigorous studio practice. Through a convergence of interest in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity and women's work; her art explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies, which have an ability to live with cultural ambiguities and use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions. Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union's School of Art and participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has held residencies at The Headlands, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Lower East Side Print Shop, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace. Baez’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The LA Times, Art in America, New American Paintings, The Huffington Post, Studio Museum Magazine and is featured in the Phaidon contemporary drawing anthology Vitamin D2. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The Perez Art Museum of Miami, The Provincetown Art Museum and was on view at The Studio Museum's emerging artist exhibition Fore. Her work was recently featured in the US Biennial Prospect.3 in New Orleans, curated by Franklin Sirmans. Báez will have her first solo museum exhibitions at The Perez Museum of Art in Miami and The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2015. She was a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award as well as the Jaque and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting.
