Artists and activists debate the intersections between public art and issues of equity, representation, social justice, and beyond.
What are the impacts, positive and negative, that public art can have on the built environment? Drawing on their personal experiences and work, Laurie Anderson, Firelei Báez, Walter Hood, and Justin Garrett Moore explore the thorny issues surrounding the decision-making process of civic projects and the motivations that lie behind public art and monuments. What happens when artistic and creative concerns clash with commercial and political ones? How should social justice and equity be addressed through aesthetics? And how can public art best be used to strengthen and uplift communities?
The New York–based artist Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, reworking visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Born in 1981 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent, Báez traces her concerns with the politics of place and heritage back to her upbringing on the border between the island of Hispaniola’s two neighboring countries, whose long-standing tensions are predicated in large part on ethnic difference.
Firelei Báez, Beauty as a practice (to see in discrete angles and blocks), 2019.
Acrylic and oil on on archival printed canvas, 89 x 114 3/8 in.
In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plant life, folkloric and literary references, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, her paintings incorporate the visual languages of regionally specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy to envision identities as unfixed and inherited narratives as perpetually evolving.
