Firelei Báez: An Open Horizon (or) the Stillness of a Wound | Art21 "New York Close Up"

FIRELEI BÁEZ:
In most power relationships,

you have the victim trying to solve the situation.

I don't want to create narratives of victimhood.

I want to flip it.

The freedom that I offer in each painting
is in the mutable body.

In having bodies in constant transition,

it leaves it open for the viewer to
shift ideas of power.

In that process,
you shift the world around you.

That's where beauty can be subversive.

["Firelei Báez: An Open Horizon (or)
the Stillness of a Wound"]

If it were up to me,

I'd be a hermit in some mountain seascape,

[LAUGHS]

and I'd have my giant space with open windows,

and f*** it if rains comes in.

That's the dream.

[CHORAL SINGING]

[Firelei's studio, The Bronx]

But I remember always making.

Maybe one time when I was six,

other kids would have me draw out these
very fancy "mariquitas" for them.

I would have these elaborate ball gowns.

They would always have very intricate hair.

I was always dealing with the body.

My earliest childhood was in Loma de Cabrera,

which is right at the border of
Dominican Republic and Haiti.

[ARCHIVAL VOICE OVER]
--Should you go straight out

--from that southeast end of Cuba,

--you will come next to the second largest
island of the romantic archipelago.

We would make all these assumptions of what
it is to be someone from the Caribbean,

and when you fall outside that,
then you can get something better.

One of the first reasons that I wanted to
work on these paintings

was looking at some of the first
scientific illustrations

of flora and fauna from the New World.

Looking at Carl Linneaus,

here is this guy who was the foundation of
modern scientific methods--

of observation and categorization.

But so much of his work was sheer nonsense.

It equated the New World Black and Brown body

with beastiality.

In telling of what the New World people were,

you'd be next to cannibals and vampires--

so, leaning into their already fallible vision

and making something new.

In reading my paintings of "ciguapas,"

I'm asking the viewer to come to terms
with their own feelings

around a woman's body.

[Ciguapa: A mythological 
creature of Domincan folklore]

The ciguapa is this trickster figure.

She is a seductress.

Someone will be lured by her and then 
be completely lost and never seen again.

The description is so ambiguous.

It can be anything from a mongoose,

to the most beautiful woman,

to the most ugly woman.

The only certain thing is 
that her legs are backwards--

if you followed their footsteps, you 
were going in the wrong direction--

and that she has this lustrous mane of hair.

She was meant to be something 
that made us so fearful

that we could be quiet for long 
enough to be groomed into civility.

The normative tone of the story

is these are wanton female creatures.

They're hyper-sexual and they derail culture.

The understory is they are highly independent,

they're self-possessed,

and they feel deeply.

So who would want to be that?

What was exciting in using that image

was to be able to incorporate all 
those things that were labeled abject--

that were seen as unwanted--

and reframe them as something beautiful

and with an eye of desire.

["Ciguapa Antellana," 2018, Harlem]

I recently went to my aunts, and she was like,

"You know, I never would have 
thought you would be an artist."

She was the one who was
raising us when I was about seven.

For her, she saw it as a 
little bit of troublemaking,

because I'd be the one 
trying to sew paper together

and getting my finger stuck in the needle.

Like sewing right through my finger.

But I was just like, "I want to bind my book."

"It's going to be the thing. 
I'm going to make it perfect."

They did call me...I don't know if it 
was "The Demolisher" or "The Hellion."

[LAUGHS]

Whenever I imagine a painter,

it's someone who is very composed--

kind of like a "lady painter."

But, I feel like a car mechanic.

My mom is a master seamstress.

She can make really beautiful things.

But she was so caught up in a 100-hour work week

that she always does things for bare function.

It makes for a lot of precarity.

So none of the things that you build tend to last.

I'm trying to break that cycle 
and teach my nephews and nieces

to think of themselves as part 
of longer cycles behind them

and long cycles before them--

that every choice that we make is predicated 
by the people we hope to love in the future

and the people we love in the past.

It's always within your grasp

to make something new.

It's exhausting,

but limitless.