Firelei Báez' "Untitled (Temple of Time)", 2020, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas.Wilks Family Collection, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle/Supplied
The American painter Firelei Baez’s first Canadian solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) contains multitudes. It’s an Afrofuturist vision that re-forms the canon even as it pays homage; a painterly yet political expression that reinvents colonial maps and architecture – infusing them with powerful colour and vivacity; and an historical study of the Atlantic basin reimagined through the lens of folklore, fantasy and science fiction.
But the exhibition featuring over two dozen paintings (some over 20 feet in length), drawings and sculptural installations, is also a celebration of beauty. The show, which opened last weekend and runs through March, 2025, is Baez’s first mid-career survey.
“For a long time in the art world,” says VAG’s Director of Curatorial Programs Eva Respini, who arrived here in 2023 from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (where the exhibition first opened in April), “beauty was a dirty word.” It was especially pejorative in a gendered context, she notes.
To drink in Baez’s large tableaux in the flesh at the Vancouver Art Gallery – and to gaze at the fine detail, lush colours, studied brush strokes and “Rorschach” style unconscious images fusing animal, vegetable and human – is a nourishing feast for the senses.
In an age of artificial intelligence, there is something comforting in her analog honouring of the tactile qualities of paint and a return to an art form whose golden age was in the 18th century – even as she blows apart ideologies of the same era.
Even if the subject is inspired by horror – such as her installation named after Detroit techno duo Drexciya whose Afrofuturist concept albums from the 1990s and 2000s imagined a utopian underwater world populated by the descendants of pregnant slaves thrown overboard during journeys through the Middle Passage – the result is aesthetically pleasing.
"A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways)" 2019, inspired by an Afro-futurist vision of an underwater realm where the children of pregnant slaves thrown overboard in the Middle Passage survived and thrived.James Cohan, The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection, Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle/Supplied
A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) is one of the exhibition’s highlights and effectively functions as the fourth sibling of three “portal” paintings spaced throughout the show.
Perforated blue tarp (a material often used for shelter following natural disasters, particularly in Haiti and the Dominican Republic where the artist’s family is from) allows filtered light to illuminate a womb-like underwater grotto. Images of Marie-Louise Coidavid – the last Queen of Haiti – and her two daughters act as guardians of a sacred, transformative space. As the viewer exits through a birth canal-like corridor, they become part of the experience.
The other “portal” paintings include two similar looking 2019 works called respectively Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waning and Adjusting the Moon (The right to non-imperative clarities): Waxing. Featuring a black body framed in a colonial-style archway concentrically radiating brightly-coloured shafts of light, they channel an Afrofuturist Vitruvian man.
But perhaps the real initial portal is an installation first created for the Perez Museum in Miami called (and yes, Baez’s poetic titles speak to her voracious literary appetites) once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and more differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming.
Firelei Baez's show, which opened last weekend at the VAG and runs through March, 2025, is the artist's first mid-career survey. Her work work pictured here, "Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body)". It depicts a mouthless Haitian woman wearing one of the head coverings imposed by the French to cover her hair.Hadani Ditmars/The Globe and Mail
Located in the gallery’s entrance atrium, where Marie Khouri’s stylized Arabic calligraphy sculptures once stood, the work reads like an architectural ruin. Embodying comingling layers of 19th Century William Morris-style wallpaper motifs and traditional West African indigo designs, the work is inspired by the ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace – one of the first buildings constructed after the Haitian Revolution. Its tactile, textural nature is enhanced by explicit instructions to touch its surface.
Indeed, entering into Baez’s work, it’s hard to tell where the portals end and the art begins. Everything is an invitation to access a shape-shifting reimagined world, where women’s body parts emerge from colonial maps and a myriad of influences from Persian miniatures to Caribbean mythologies challenge conventional notions of time, space and dominance.
The 2020 work Temple of Time explodes European history marked by classical columns with a sun-like sphere radiating technicolour beams, celebrating the simultaneity of past, present and future.
A painting that could be a self-portrait suggests a meeting between Octavia Butler and Lewis Carroll. A black female figure with a face of flowers lies down in reverie reading a book by the Afrofuturist writer who has so influenced Baez. This is surely Firelei in Wonderland.
Baez’s wall size installation Man Without a Country (aka anthropophagist wading in the Artibonite River) (2014–15), is an encyclopedic, phantasmagorical kind of book art, employing 225 pages sourced from late 19th century texts on the history of Hispaniola – the Caribbean Island that is divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The pages are used as supports for drawings depicting magical creatures and maps of fantastical landscapes born of Caribbean mythology and the artist’s imagination – fusing folkloric motifs with academic writing. It is an historical diorama for our times.
Fused onto the grand neo-classical architecture of the gallery’s Georgia Street façade, a site specific banner installation by Baez manages to simultaneously embrace, challenge and transcend the legacy of the building that was once a provincial courthouse.
Viewing Baez's work is an invitation to access a shape-shifting reimagined world with this piece being inspired by the ruins of the Sans-Souci Palace- one of the first buildings constructed after the Haitian Revolution.Hadani Ditmars/The Globe and Mail
Truth was the bridge (or an emancipatory healing) (2024) features a ciguapa – a legendary Dominican wild woman who consumes men as prey and is a recurring symbol of female power in Baez’s work. Perched over a map on the left panel, while a tidal wave on the right crashes towards the centre, the work is an invitation to reimagine colonial histories for future generations.
“Vancouver,” Baez tells The Globe of her inspiration for the banner, “has this other sense of time. This is epic water space – closer to Japan than Europe. It’s a place of potentiality. The waters of the Pacific hold the whole world together.”
While Baez’s sources are normally from the Atlantic basin, says Respini, her work is about “a reorientation of the Americas.” This has resonance locally, she notes, and “introduces Vancouver to a larger conversation.”