Show Notes
Today on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed artist Firelei Baez!
Hailed for her paintings that explode with effervescent colour and are filled with elements from the natural and supernatural world, or hybridised figures morphing in and out of abstraction, Baez works on myriad surfaces to create deeper conversations about hierarchies in history. Her paintings are always embedded with so much meaning that, as well as being visually arresting and beautiful, revealed biases about our past while also being embedded in history. So much of her work is rooted in myth, such as the stories she grew up learning in the Dominican Republic about the female tricksters, ciguapas, as well as her interest in spirituality.
Born in 1980, Baez from age seven lived in Miami, and after hearing about a free art school in New York City, moved to the city to study at Cooper Union, then to Skowhegan, and back to New York to complete her Masters at Hunter College. In 2022, she was included in the formative Venice Biennale exhibition The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and since 2024, has been the subject of a major solo exhibition in the US organised by the ICA Boston, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.
In recent years, Baez's work has moved into sculpture, working in bronze in forms influenced by shapeshifting alien beings from the writings of Octavia Butler. She has also scaled up her painting work, working on canvases up to 50 feet wide that are nothing but an otherworldly yet worldly experience, showing nature back to us in the most profound of ways. And I cannot wait to find out more.
THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: www.famm.com/en/ www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Tory Pope Co-produced with Molly Lafosse Music by Ben Wetherfield
More from The Great Women Artists
Today on the GWA podcast is curator Mary Morton on the extraordinary painter Mary Cassatt!
TODAY on the GWA Podcast is curator and writer Lisa Le Feuvre, on the acclaimed land artist NANCY HOLT!
It's a new season of The Great Women Artists Podcast and we're kicking things off with the esteemed ceramicist and writer, Edmund de Waal!
TODAY on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed painter Joan Snyder. Hailed for her large-scale gestural canvases that pulsate with colour, line and text, and are often layered with, buried in, or imploded with images of flowers, faces, or bodies, Snyder's all-encompassing works are nothing but electric. Sometimes large scale, with brushstrokes that populate the canvas like gemstones or musical scores with a whole range of keys: look at Snyder's work for a while, and it's like whole worlds emerge. Simultaneously soft but violent, beautiful yet aggressive, her works can evoke every season of emotion, just as she once wrote in her journal in 1972: "The strokes in my painting speak of my life and experiences. They are sometimes soft, they sometimes laugh, and are often violent. They bleed and cry. I speak of love and anguish, of fear, and mostly of hope."
TODAY on the GWA Podcast: a very special bonus episode with Lubaina Himid, on her British Council Commission for the British Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2026, "Presenting History: Testing Translation".