Artist Interview: Firelei Baez

Firelei Báez is an award-winning artist of Haitian-Dominican descent who has exhibited nationally and internationally. Báez was raised in Dajabón, Dominican Republic near the northeastern border with Haiti. Though the Dominican Republic has a historically contentious relationship with Haiti, Báez acknowledges the permeability of shared experiences between these two spaces. Her work blurs boundaries of shape and form, color and context, mythology and memory.

She exhibited four works in Disillusions: Questions for Doig in Trinidad (2011); Just Another Geographer, in Search of Space Which Will Fit His Poetic Design, from the ‘Carib’s Jhator’ series (2011); Trading Twelves (2011); and Recalibration of the Real (2011), both from the same series.

Questions for Doig in Trinidad, from the Geographic Delay series, is a mixed-media collage of a woman whose commanding size (120 x 36”) spans over two levels of the gallery space. A network of tattooed signs and symbols is articulated on her expansive flesh and unshaved legs. She wears a multi-colored, jewel-encrusted swimsuit as she stands with a raised finger parting her lips in a gesture of prescribed seduction. However, this is not a seductive image but quite the contrary. It challenges the expectations of Caribbeanness, black female subjectivity, and the exploitation of hypersexualized bodies of color. The title references the Scottish-born blue-chip painter Peter Doig who currently lives and works in Trinidad. The conceptual interrogation of Doig in Trinidad through this female body may be read as a reflection of the intellectual colonization of the Caribbean.

In Just Another Geographer, in Search of Space which Will Fit his Poetic Design, Báez creates an anthropomorphic body festooned with color and light, flora and fauna. The two-legged, high-heeled figure has a posterior of magenta blossoms in gold and green clouds. Her headdress is made of palm trees and sunshine. In contrast with Questions for Doig in Trinidad, the self-assuredness of the female stance connotes a powerful composure and a performative consciousness.

Baez’s two smaller works from the Carib’s Jhator series further her investigation of anthropomorphic female beings and verdant bodies, their whimsical protrusions or headdresses reminiscent of Carnival celebrations. Although I refer to these extensions of the body as “headdresses,” these mythical bodies appear in a way that dissembles detailed descriptions of heads, torsos, and extremities. The almost silhouetted figures conceal their borders, encoding beginnings and endings and thereby allowing for a more ambiguous and fluid interpretation of the work.

Tashima Thomas: Firelei, I was wondering if you could talk about who have been some of your artistic influences and what inspires you.

Firelei Baez: I moved around a lot while growing up and changed schools repeatedly, which didn’t allow for much of a formal art education. Among my earliest influences were the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. I learned to draw from studying reproductions of his work. When I finally had the opportunity to take art as an elective while studying psychology at a local community college, I realized that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. My professor told me about Cooper Union’s prestigious tuition-free program, and I was fortunate to be accepted. At this point in my formal art education, I had pretty much only been exposed to reproductions of classical European art.

TT: So, your point of departure was the canon of art history basically in its most traditional sense.

FB: Yes, exactly. My first introduction to contemporary art was in Miami at the Rubell Family Collection, during that same community college elective art class. The collection is located in what used to be the main storage warehouse for Miami’s Drug Enforcement Administration. It was there that I saw Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work and his series of posters, and I thought, “This is contemporary art!” After that, I started actively choosing things that I liked. I began looking at the work of artists like Ana Mendieta and Trenton Doyle Hancock. I was interested in their mythmaking. Then, I started looking at works by Kara Walker, Helen Gallagher, and Walton Ford. I became interested in presenting natively fluent personal cultural narratives that were neither ethnographic nor political but globally informed reinterpretations of regional mythologies and traditions. My work became a convergence of interest in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity and women’s work.

TT: You talked a little about mythmaking and the appearance of the mythological body is definitely is a recurring subject in your work. Why do you think mythmaking is so important?

FB: I think it’s important for me because growing up we moved around a lot, which kind of left me rudderless. Even as a young child, I would create these environments in my bedroom from whatever fabrics, shoeboxes, or other materials I had available. Beginning with a box and building from there, I would construct environments one on top of the other, and then, of course, I would always have to let them go. Within that process we have this building, building, and building going on, and, in the end, we have this letting go. The image creation process functions in an almost identical way, through accumulation. Building up is an anchoring. Culturally, it works the same way. How can we possibly identify with this land or that land when we don’t belong to either one? What is it that makes us feel like we belong while we’re there? And those are the kinds of things that you make up, both mentally and physically while you’re in there. The images I create may seem pastoral, as in Ciguapa Habilis, but they are visceral reactions to living in an urban environment. Here is this feral creature or houseplant, enclosed within a white space. People wanted to know how is it that I live in such an urban environment, and, yet, the city doesn’t show up in my work, but it does. It’s readily available in the year-long portrait series, Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag Test to the Fan Test. Through the daily logging of the changes in my hair, skin, and gaze, this anonymous urban creature, a city inhabitant, emerges.

TT: I find mythology very important and one of the reasons is because it gives us a framework for understanding our environment. Mythology reveals the mysteries of where we are and why we are—as you stated, “anchoring” us and also serving as a lens through which we are able to understand ourselves, our motivations, destinations, and others. In that way it is sine qua non to our existence. In other words, we need mythologies. Let’s go back to the mythologized figures, where we have beings that are difficult to decode, both because of the details of their physical framework and their borders. Where does one part of the anatomy start or stop?

FB: My formative years were spent in the mountains between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in a place called Dajabón, so from an early age, I’ve been aware of borders. I’ve also been thinking about the female body as being this permeable thing and, especially, how the Caribbean body is often viewed or understood as being so fecund that, unless it’s been exhausted, it’s just going to replenish itself immediately. This thing that is at the point of rotting, that you have to prune so that it doesn’t grow wild on you. I think this is in relation to agriculture in the Caribbean. There’s been this excessive use of pesticides on the crops there. Women of African descent have the highest amount of ovarian cysts and ovarian tumors, creating these abnormal growths within the body. I know so many young women of African descent who have had to have surgery to remove ovarian cysts and tumors. The female body is affected by the pumping in of all of these pesticides, which distort and disease the body creating these abnormal growths. The making of mythologies is, in a way, also a process of relearning and re-contextualizing history.

TT: Let’s move on to talk about process. How do you feel about the use of line in your work as it appears repeatedly in a way that is very dedicated and delicate? Do you find line meditative?

FB: Yes, I find both line and pattern to be meditative. It’s almost like I have to leave myself and repeat the mark. I work more effortlessly when I’m in that meditative state. Sometimes I come in and out of it. I find that when I come out of that state of concentration that it’s harder going back to work on the piece so I prefer to stay in that place until I finish. I painted Ciguapa Habilis for instance, which is about ten feet tall, in about one day, while lost in the mark making.

TT: That is a very large intricate piece; lots and lots of really beautiful lines. The pieces included in Disillusions are from the Carib’s Jhator and the Geographic Delays series. I was wondering if you could talk a little about the idea of the Carib’s Jhator as a transformative entity. In other words, why do you think we carry within us this desire for transformation as a personal and universal experience?

FB: A Jhator is a Tibetan sky burial—where the body is placed on a mountaintop, exposing it to the elements and to birds of prey, releasing it from its earthly realm. I was drawn to this idea of actively releasing the body both physically and culturally. I wanted to bring that point of release to my work, to make room for these black bodies outside their heavy Caribbean histories. It’s hard to leave your body behind though, especially when your body is always being thrown up in your face. The question is: How to remove weight, to move toward lightness? How to do this while still acknowledging the particular history of a body that has often been used as the only cultural capital we had? Going beyond it as a kind of psychic release. It’s a willful, stubborn hopefulness. The willfulness is expressed as being a part of a living thing with constant cycles, being aware of change and mentally preparing yourself to pull a rabbit out of a hat at a moment’s need. (Robert Storr spoke about a similar release and lightness in David Hammons’ work.) You have to believe that you will have a change or transformation. Nothing should be constant. Growing up as an urban nomad—willfully believing that change is going to happen and it’s going to be positive—in a way, it just gives hope. The only way to keep one’s agency is to have hope.

TT: I’m interested in the appearance of the tropically lush landscape/bodyscape. Could you talk about this some more?

FB: They are mostly reactions to historical texts on the Caribbean landscape which describe it, both in negative and positive terms, as particularly female; from Columbus’ first descriptions of the New World, to Antonio S. Pedreira and Tomás Blanco in Puerto Rico, Édouard Glissant in Martinique, Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott in the Anglophone Caribbean, José Lezama Lima and Antonio Benítez-Rojo in Cuba among many others. Their words, whether full of fond disdain or frustration constantly brought up the image of an overly fecund, languid and passive female landscape that needed to be controlled. I entered this Caribbean discourse with a contemporary understanding that it’s not just the landscape; it affects real bodies in real time. The female body is posited as a reflection of culturally conceptualized notions of place. In an urban environment, one finds a type of nostalgia for a remembered landscape. Growing up on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, despite their tensions, the landscape still nurtured me. I was able to play freely within it. Once in an urban environment I almost had this eerie feeling of kinship between myself and a domesticated house plant. You have this domestication of the landscape/bodyscape in contained spaces in the city. The creation of my Self seemed malleable while growing up in the Dominican Republic/Haiti, with their folklore and culture of endless slippery racial categorizations. In contrast the culture of the United States limited me to a single status — that of Afro-Latina. In response, I tried to disrupt current systems of social categorization through the creation of characters that refused definition. In the Carib’s Jhator Series I continue to formally decategorize the body through color and pattern. I believe that refracting the body allows the viewer to first process the work physically, body to body, much like the other larger works do.

TT: With the works from the Carib’s Jhator series, the women have these extensions on their heads. I’ve been calling them headdresses because they remind me of Carnival, but they could also be read as sites of resistance. I’m reminded of the sumptuary laws of 1786 in New Orleans under Spanish Rule, when the governor, Esteban Rodriguez Miró, enacted a law that required women of color (mulattas, quadroons, octaroons, etc.) to wear a head covering which served as a signal marking them as women of color. So, since they were required to wear head coverings or a tignon, they decided to wrap their heads in the most luxurious fabrics, silks, jewels, and elaborate designs inspired from the women of African descent in Martinique and other places. These extravagant, beautiful headdresses became sites of resistance, and the laws were eventually abolished. In a way, I see your figures as a kind of creative descendant of this tradition.

FB: I love the breaking of those sumptuary laws. What a powerful point in history! They tried to pin them down by the headdress and couldn’t. A mode of self-agency is just to be flexible enough to work around inalterable limitations. When such limitations are imposed, they are intended to lock you down. The women found a way of working around the system in what I call, “Smile them to death” – keeping up the expected veneer while working toward your objective. Of course, the headdress became the fashion in Europe. There’s an article called “Hiding within the Light” which is about truant teenage punk culture. The article discusses how when you’re in the spotlight as a truant, under constant surveillance, you have to etch a Self that grows in your own terms, like the headdress. There are so many laws that try to make or specify oppressed groups of people.

TT: On one of the headdresses in the Carib’s Jhator series, we find the embellishments of feet and shoes and the dominance of feet and shoes appear in other works. Could you talk about that?

FB: At what point are objects like stilettos and oxfords things of nurture or nature? The ornamentation of the heel is just that, ornamentation, but it’s also a thing of power. At what point is it something that is imposed on the female body, and when does it become a choice? The shoes and feet are a declaration of place. Going back to the historical conception of the female body as animalistic or as a sexual animal, I kept thinking about the cloven foot, and this, in turn, reminded me of satyrs as mythological creatures, revealing a culture’s notions of sexuality and gender. I related them back to that Caribbean sexualized body. The first images to come out of these notions were the initial silhouettes of the Ciguapa Series. A ciguapa is a folkloric female creature that inhabits the Dominican highland forests and preys on wayward men, like so many other mythical female creatures. She wreaks havoc but is untraceable because of her backward facing feet and subsequently misleading footsteps. These paintings, which are loose interpretations rather than literal descriptions, became the architecture for later series such as the work being shown in Disillusions.

TT: How do you decide on the scale of a piece?

FB: I want to provide a sublime experience, where you’re experiencing it physically before being able to process it mentally. Even though it’s two-dimensional, you still receive it as three-dimensional, and, therefore, it cannot be visually exploited because it occupies the mental space as a three-dimensional object. The physical presence of a large-scale piece thwarts the viewing aggression. When you’re painting bodies of color, it’s that Xica da Silva appraisal happening all over again. There is a point in the classic Brazilian film Xica Da Silva, where Xica, a slave, is having her teeth appraised like property, and she bites the appraiser’s fingers – hard. She’s fighting that through self-assertion. For example, in the piece, Questions for Doig in Trinidad, the legs have these loose hair-like tendrils of paper, overlaid with vellum, which move when you move towards it. So, when the viewer comes in closer, it’s almost like she’s reacting to your presence. She’s a mixture of all of these different permutations – between acts, like a performance. She is Ochún and Erzili, who is Haitian and has about 15 different permutations. Sometimes she appears as a bird of prey or a vulture. Questions for Doig in Trinidad is performing this Caribbean body for this one guy, the artist Peter Doig. I’m thinking of the whole island as this performing body showing love, whether it’s for its benefit or not.

TT: Questions for Doig in Trinidad strikes a sexy pose but it is not read as a sexy image.

FB: It’s a pre-sexy image. She’s like a performer between acts, ready to put on her show and just as she licks the finger on her lips she remembers, “Oh crap! I have all this stuff to take care of at home.”

This interview was conducted in 2011 and was published in the exhibition catalog for the show, “Disillusions: Gendered Visions of the Caribbean and its Diasporas,” curated by Tatiana Flores. For more information, please see the link below.

http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/disillusions-FINALx.pdf