On the heels of her subway installation, artist Firelei Baez has new work in the windows at MoMA, in which she asks, “How do you make someone present when history has made such an effort to erase them?”
Firelei Báez’s paintings and installations explore the histories of Afro-Latina and Afro-Caribbean women who have largely been forgotten by the West, and can now be seen in NYC public spaces, Uptown and Midtown. Baez’s #MTAArts mosaic installation “Ciguapa Antellana, me llamo sueño de la madrugada. (who more sci-fi than us)” (2018) at 163rd Street-Amsterdam Ave (C) incorporates ciguapas, powerful feminine figures from Dominican folklore. In her newly installed MoMA #ModernWindow installation on 53rd Street, “For Améthyste and Athénaïre (Exiled Muses Beyond Jean Luc Nancy’s Canon), Anacaonas”, Báez reclaims the stories of the daughters of the first king and queen of Haiti, as no paintings or photographs of them are known to exist.
