Dominican-American Artist Firelei Báez at Vancouver Art Gallery

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Firelei Báez, “Untitled (Temple of Time),” 2020, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas (photo by Phoebe d’Heurle, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Unsurprisingly, I first became familiar with Dominican-American artist Firelei Báez’s work online. While sometimes digital interfaces do a fine job of communicating a general sense of an artwork, in this case, squares on Instagram can’t do justice to the artist’s attention to texture, detail, and colour. 

The first North American survey exhibition of Báez’s work is on view until Mar. 16, 2025 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It is also the first show curated at the VAG by Eva Respini. Formerly of ICA Boston, she recently joined the VAG as deputy director and director of curatorial programs. 

Respini and Báez are a bright pair in the contemporary art world. This exhibition is a huge “get” for our city, and hints at changes in store as the VAG begins its steady glow-up in the coming months and years. 

Báez’s oeuvre, spanning two decades, is composed of drawing, sculpture, installation, and her vivid and visionary painting that imagines postcolonial futurity. Works among the collection tend towards larger scales, are often mainly on canvas or paper, and are multi-dimensional to the extent that gesture, pattern, and exuberant use of colour invite longer contemplation and reward close inspection. Báez has mastered a unique marbling technique where paintings are figural, recognizing bodies, but blur forms into richly layered jewel tones. Many works in gouache amplify this practice, but just as frequently oil and acrylic, often demanding and exacting mediums, explode into triumphant starbursts — an expansive delight. 

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Firelei Báez, “Untitled (United States Marine Hospital),” 2019, oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas (photo by Phoebe d’Heurle, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

One piece that stays with me is an understated work on paper from 2015 that hangs in the first room, Wanderlust demanding recompense. A tropical tree, about seven feet tall, grows upwards, its foliage, while richly hued and varied in texture, is mere dressing to the trunk, which extends into a soft human-like belly, and roots into two perched feet that kneel as if about to stand. The body of the palm is shaggy with downy fur that sways with a subtle humour. 

The show is anchored by two massive installations. The first, (one we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming), 2014, is an architectural portal at the base of the gallery’s famous rotunda. Modelled on the Sans-Souci Palace in Milot, Haiti, it contains an archway that invites visitors to pass through. Its painted surface references the ruin of the original structure, deliberately dappled and worn in constellations of blue that appear on all sides.

Upstairs, an immersive room from 2019 called A Drexcyan chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), transports viewers to the ocean floor. Walls and ceiling draped in perforated recycled tarp give way to soft blue light that imagines an underwater world inspired by the Detroit techno group Drexcia, whose Afro-Futurist narratives imagined a mythical underwater kingdom populated by enslaved bodies thrown overboard along the Middle Passage. Save for scale and subject, these works underwhelm, perhaps hanging on a little too hard to literalisms. 

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Firelei Báez, “Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body),” 2015, acrylic and ink on linen (photo by Oriol Tarridas)

Wall didactics remind the audience that this is art intended to challenge existing power structures and the violence of colonization. While I heartily embrace modes of decolonization, during the artist and curator led tour, language frequently drifted into clichés about struggle and renewal. Sometimes audiences treat artworks as an end unto themselves, where paintings and sculptures solve the problems that they address by simply being about something, yet language is finite and meaning is almost always abstract. This exhibition was more effective for me when I resisted the assurance of futurity that the descriptions seem to promise and approached the artworks as meditations on the present rather than interventions in the future. ■

Firelei Báez is on view until Mar. 16, 2025 at the Vancouver Art Gallery

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