Artist Firelei Báez was born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent. She grew up on the border between Hispaniola’s two neighboring countries before moving to Miami with her family at the age of nine. Deeply entangled with her mixed heritage and diasporic upbringing, her work is an act of resistance against “the idea that the Caribbean is a space without history. You’re taught that you’ve been transplanted there and are at the service of a pleasure complex for others. . . . I want to claim it back, celebrate, and revel in it.”

Brown female bodies occupy much of Báez’s work as she weaves new mythologies for the Caribbean that restore power to traditional images of suppression—including figures, often self-portraits, with tignons (a hairdo imposed on Creole women in Louisiana in 1786)—or characters from Dominican folklore such as the ciguapa, a mythological trickster figure with a hairy body and inverse feet. The artist often employs indices of colonial legacy as the literal ground for her compositions, inscribing them onto historical documents such as maps, building plans, or advertisements for sugar, rum, or coffee produced in the Caribbean that point to the presence and influence of French, Spanish, or English powers.

In Laure (New Generall Chart for the West Indies of E. Wright’s Projection), the protagonist—named after the Black model featured in Edouard Manet’s iconic painting Olympia (1863)—inhabits a pastoral setting painted onto a reproduction of the first and most important English-language sea atlas. It depicts the region covered by the infamous trade triangle of the British slavers, who took British-manufactured goods including rum and textiles to Africa and bartered them for slaves to transport to the Americas, where they exchanged them for the sugar, cotton, and tobacco that they supplied to the factories of Britain. Employing a variety of painting techniques that layer and build into a lush composition of a figure in landscape, the artist visually buries the chart of imperialism under the colorful blossoming and magmatic quality of nature and body. The visual push and pull between back- and foreground is central to the artist’s vision of the Caribbean as a self-determined space of history and identity.