In this episode, two New York-based artists, Firelei Báez Julia Santos Solomon, explore what it means to create for themselves and for their communities, and how empathy grounds their work while spurring new modes of creativity. Both artists have roots on Hispaniola, and their relationship to tropical landscape and family have profoundly shaped their practices.
Firelei Báez: I am a Haitian-Dominican artist, who has lived most of her life in the US, and by, I guess many markers would be considered now like an American artist.
Fernanda Espinosa: That's Firelei Báez, our guest artist for this episode. Firelei casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm through exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations.
When I travel outside of the US—even when I travel back into the Caribbean—it's a strange in-between space where I am now an "Americana." [Laughs.] So I live, and I think, inhabit that multiple identity of existing between these spaces and feeling fully from all of them and none of them at once.
I was born in the Dominican Republic and raised right at the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti in Dajabón, Loma de Cabrera, where, as a rambunctious little kid, I would just climb trees and roll down hills and play. Nature was a very big component in my upbringing. Some of the fondest memories I have are of being in nature and playing in nature, which I think have become foundational to how I feel in the world.
I would mostly be sent to the countryside to Loma de Cabrera when there were student strikes or for the summer when my mom needed a break from us. We'd be sent to our grandmother, and aunts in Loma. But by the time I was about four and a half, as a young child before getting to go to elementary school, I remember being sent over to my grandmother's and It was about the point where my mom was going to emigrate. So that meant that for a few years, my older sister and I were away from her, stayed with our family, and a lot of adventures ensued, and a lot of really strong memories have stayed from that point.
I remember being in the elementary school in the countryside and one of the young children died by drowning, and the entire school walked single file up the mountain and went to his wake.
