Exhibition Guide
Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me)
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Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me) Visual Description
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Art Object Info
Firelei Báez’s works intertwine myth and history, exploring themes of resilience and the enduring scars of colonialism. These two paintings center the ciguapa, a mythological female trickster figure from Dominican folklore, symbolizing the Caribbean’s complex history as a site of colonial violence and cultural richness.
In Convex (recalibrating a blind spot), Báez paints a ciguapa over a diagram of a sugar refinery in New Orleans, Louisiana. The architectural image conceals the function of the building as a place of resource extraction and exploitation, but Baez reconnects it to the enslaved people forced to work there by adding cascading blue water, a reference to the “Middle Passage,” the perilous transatlantic shipping route of the slave trade.
Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me)
Firelei Báez’s works intertwine myth and history, exploring themes of resilience and the enduring scars of colonialism. These two paintings center the ciguapa, a mythological female trickster figure from Dominican folklore, symbolizing the Caribbean’s complex history as a site of colonial violence and cultural richness.
In Convex (recalibrating a blind spot), Báez paints a ciguapa over a diagram of a sugar refinery in New Orleans, Louisiana. The architectural image conceals the function of the building as a place of resource extraction and exploitation, but Baez reconnects it to the enslaved people forced to work there by adding cascading blue water, a reference to the “Middle Passage,” the perilous transatlantic shipping route of the slave trade.