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Lot Essay
We have, because of your oppression, learned you better than you have learned us. Can we have new terms of engagement? Can we start different conversations?Firelei Báez, interview with Eva Respini, in Firelei Báez: to breathe full and free, Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2022, p. 148)
Confronting the viewer’s gaze in quiet witness, Firelei Báez’s monumental Josephine Judas GOAT (it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes you does not mean I relinquish it) convenes an homage to diasporic women. Envisioning imaginary subjects through a subversively appropriative lens, the artist updates the traditional status of portraiture in the Western art historical canon. In the present work, Báez—whose work offers multilayered probes into the legacies of colonial histories, attending to the African diaspora in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas—successfully rejects the traditional narrative of Black objecthood in transatlantic histories, articulating instead new forms of engagement centered around Black subjectivity.
Firelei Báez, born in the Dominican Republic on the border with Haiti, with ancestry in both nations, draws from her background to cast diasporic histories into an imaginative realm. In doing so, she explores Afrofuturist possibilities, granting agency to the women who populate her portraits. Feted with numerous prestigious solo exhibitions, including at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Báez has also had works included in the central pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale and has received many significant awards. A groundbreaking solo survey just ended at the ICA, Boston and will soon travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery then to the Des Moines Art Center. Her work features in many important international private and public collections, including among others the Tate in London and the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York.
Josephine Judas GOAT, from her important Bloodlines series, is the largest work of Báez’s to come to auction. Báez draws upon African, Latin American, and Black diasporic cultures and histories for Bloodlines to depict textiles and hair designs as symbols of Black resistance. The beautiful and elaborate silver tignon—headdresses foisted upon women of color by race-based sumptuary laws in eighteenth-century New Orleans—swathing the woman in Josephine Judas GOAT identifies hair anxieties suffered by Black women in both past and present, seen to this day where straightening and other hair manipulations function as what Báez terms “self-inflicted violence” but also as a language for traversing such violence through an “acrobatics of assimilation” (F. Báez, interview with Thelma Golden, op. cit., p. 35). The indigo, carmine, and garnet pigments which make up the woman’s body counter dogmatic Eurocentric color theories with color pairings predicated by African traditions; the blueish tones reference someone like Yemoja, a deity in the Yoruba Pantheon who represents an introspective and mediative space.
Báez incorporates into her practice lessons she learned from reading the influential Black writers Saidiya Hartman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, filling in historical gaps in Western histories of Black figures. Báez is able to render formerly deprecatory symbols, such as the tignon, into reaffirming sites of cultural celebration and generative healing. The work’s poetic parenthesized title alludes to this affirmative vision, suggesting internal empowerment against external prejudice. Josephine Judas GOAT emphatically celebrates markers of difference, reframing them into an empowered subjective identity.
Confronting the viewer’s gaze in quiet witness, Firelei Báez’s monumental Josephine Judas GOAT (it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes you does not mean I relinquish it) convenes an homage to diasporic women. Envisioning imaginary subjects through a subversively appropriative lens, the artist updates the traditional status of portraiture in the Western art historical canon. In the present work, Báez—whose work offers multilayered probes into the legacies of colonial histories, attending to the African diaspora in the Caribbean and throughout the Americas—successfully rejects the traditional narrative of Black objecthood in transatlantic histories, articulating instead new forms of engagement centered around Black subjectivity.
Firelei Báez, born in the Dominican Republic on the border with Haiti, with ancestry in both nations, draws from her background to cast diasporic histories into an imaginative realm. In doing so, she explores Afrofuturist possibilities, granting agency to the women who populate her portraits. Feted with numerous prestigious solo exhibitions, including at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Báez has also had works included in the central pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale and has received many significant awards. A groundbreaking solo survey just ended at the ICA, Boston and will soon travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery then to the Des Moines Art Center. Her work features in many important international private and public collections, including among others the Tate in London and the Guggenheim and Whitney museums in New York.
Josephine Judas GOAT, from her important Bloodlines series, is the largest work of Báez’s to come to auction. Báez draws upon African, Latin American, and Black diasporic cultures and histories for Bloodlines to depict textiles and hair designs as symbols of Black resistance. The beautiful and elaborate silver tignon—headdresses foisted upon women of color by race-based sumptuary laws in eighteenth-century New Orleans—swathing the woman in Josephine Judas GOAT identifies hair anxieties suffered by Black women in both past and present, seen to this day where straightening and other hair manipulations function as what Báez terms “self-inflicted violence” but also as a language for traversing such violence through an “acrobatics of assimilation” (F. Báez, interview with Thelma Golden, op. cit., p. 35). The indigo, carmine, and garnet pigments which make up the woman’s body counter dogmatic Eurocentric color theories with color pairings predicated by African traditions; the blueish tones reference someone like Yemoja, a deity in the Yoruba Pantheon who represents an introspective and mediative space.
Báez incorporates into her practice lessons she learned from reading the influential Black writers Saidiya Hartman and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, filling in historical gaps in Western histories of Black figures. Báez is able to render formerly deprecatory symbols, such as the tignon, into reaffirming sites of cultural celebration and generative healing. The work’s poetic parenthesized title alludes to this affirmative vision, suggesting internal empowerment against external prejudice. Josephine Judas GOAT emphatically celebrates markers of difference, reframing them into an empowered subjective identity.