"Firelei Báez is a Dominican-American artist whose large-scale paintings, drawings, and textiles evoke the beauty and political implications of hairstyles, textiles, and tattoos for those whose cultural identities have remained traditionally absent from dominant culture. Báez explores her own divine being signifying a wide range of imagery that attests to the artist’s own hybrid racial background. The artist developed a style in her large-scale works that challenges a traditional linear art history; these works were influenced by a wide range of images from different cultures, including techniques from Persian miniature painting, studies on the female body and subjectivities, and science fiction. She is interested in reimagining her own origins, creating laborintensive
works that explore specific issues of landscape, womanhood,and race.
Firelei Báez was born in 1981 in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, and immigrated to Miami at the age of nine. She currently lives and works in New York. Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union's School of Art in 2004, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, and later received an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2010."