For Immediate Release
Contact: Amy Day
Tel: 515.271.0344 (o)
515.612.0775 (c)
aday@desmoinesartcenter.org
DES MOINES, IOWA (May 2025) – Spanning the Art Center’s Anna K. Meredith, W.T. & Edna Dahl, and I. M. Pei galleries, “Firelei Báez” is the Des Moines Art Center’s latest exhibition featuring more than 30 works and showcasing nearly two decades of the artist’s paintings, drawings, and multi-media installations that transport viewers through time and space, creating opportunities for wonder, reflection, and enlightenment.
On view June 13 through September 21, 2025, “Firelei Báez” explores the multilayered legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. Báez draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality. Her paintings feature complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on reproductions of archival imagery such as colonial maps or construction plans for colonial architecture.
“The Des Moines Art Center is proud to host one of the 21st century’s most groundbreaking artists, Firelei Báez. Báez’s practice entices the eye and engages the senses at the same time that it challenges the mind and provokes daunting questions around agency and freedom, prejudice and state sponsored violence,” said Kelly Baum, John and Mary Pappajohn Director. “Such an exhibition reflects our intention to serve as a public forum for discussion and our strategic ambition of ‘bringing the world to Iowa, and Iowa to the world.’ We thank the artist and our institutional partners for collaborating with us on its Des Moines venue.”
The exhibition is installed in 2000 square feet of the Art Center, occupying galleries in three of the museum’s distinctive buildings. Opening the exhibition is one of Báez’s early and formative works, “Can I Pass? Introducing the Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July” (2011), in which she made a series of 31 daily self-portraits that are displayed like a calendar. Each silhouette is a unique pose with the artist’s internal state readable only through the addition of her expressive eyes. The title references the racist and widespread 20th century practice of using a brown paper bag as a color test to admit or deny people entry into social functions based on the tone of one’s skin color. The flesh tone of each portrait matches the artist’s forearm for each day depicted, memorializing the passage of time through the lightening and darkening of Báez’s skin.
At the end of the Anna K. Meredith Gallery, viewers will find themselves immersed in the multi-sensory installation “A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways)” (2019). In this room-sized work, Báez creates a grotto-like space using perforated blue tarp, a material often used as shelter and refuge following natural disasters. She envelops the space under a star map of the night of the onset of the Haitian Revolution and hand-perforated blue tarps, casting spots of light onto surfaces painted with significant symbols of the Black diaspora.
Upon entering the W.T. and Edna Dahl Galleries, the viewer will see a gallery filled with portraits representing Báez’s multi-decade exploration of femme identity. The figures in these works are depicted with intricate patterning based on tattoos and Persian miniature painting, exuberantly coiled and curly hair, and elaborate tignons (a type of headscarf first mandated under a repressive 18th century law that was transformed into a personal expression of beauty and symbol of resistance.)
The exhibition concludes in the Cowles Sculpture Court of the I. M. Pei building. There visitors will experience a work titled “once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming)” (2014), a massive archway that celebrates the Sans-Souci palace in Haiti, once inhabited by Henri Christophe, a leader of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), and “A most curious manifestation (or a boat sailing the great rapids of time)” (2024), a recent acquisition to the Art Center’s collections, purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des Moines Art Center. When the exhibition departs Des Moines in September, this incisive, resplendent painting will remain, serving to cement the relationship between the artist, her work, and the residents of Des Moines in perpetuity. It will be a piece from which generations of residents and students will continue to learn. From beginning to end, as they traverse decades and places, viewers will follow an artistic and historical journey that mirrors the arc of Baez’s own career.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, available in the Art Center’s Museum Shop, featuring pieces in the exhibition, works from throughout Báez’s career, and essays from Leticia Alvarado, Katherine Brinson, Jessica Bell Brown, Julie Crooks, Daniella Rose King, Eva Respini, Hallie Ringle, and Katy Siegel.
RELATED PROGRAMMING
Opening Celebration
Thursday, June 12 | 5 – 7 pm
Anna K. Meredith Gallery and throughout the museum
Free; no reservations required.
Firelei Báez in Conversation with John and Mary Pappajohn Director Kelly Baum
Friday, June 13 | 6:30 pm
Levitt Auditorium
Free; reservations required.
Guided Tours
Saturdays, June 21, July 12, August 9, September 13
1 – 2 pm
Meet in the Harriet S. and J. Locke Macomber Lobby
Free; no reservations required.
Gallery Talk with Associate Curator Elizabeth Gollnick
Sunday, July 20 | 1:30 pm
Anna K. Meredith Gallery and throughout the museum
Free; reservations required.
“Firelei Báez” is organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston and Eva Respini, Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, Vancouver Art Gallery (former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, ICA/Boston), with Tess Bachi Haas, Assistant Curator.
Major support for “Firelei Báez” is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, Karen and Brian Conway, David and Jocelyne DeNunzio, Mathieu O. Gaulin, The Kotzubei-Beckmann Family Philanthropic Fund, and Lise and Jeffrey Wilks, and an anonymous donor.
Additional support for the presentation of the Des Moines Art Center’s exhibition is provided by the Harriet S. and J. Locke Macomber Art Center Fund, Iowa Tourism Office and Iowa Arts Council, both a part of the Iowa Economic Development Authority, and Laurie Wolf and Jeff Freude.
For more information or to request images from the exhibition, contact Senior Director of Communications and Marketing Amy Day at aday@desmoinesartcenter.org.
Visit desmoinesartcenter.org for additional event details and registration information.
Cover Image: Firelei Báez, “A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways),” 2019. Installation view, Firelei Báez: A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways), James Cohan, New York, 2019. The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Image courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle. © Firelei Báez
Secondary Image: Firelei Báez, “Sans-Souci (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body),” 2015. Acrylic and ink on linen. 108 × 74 inches (274.3 × 188 cm). Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Lesie and Greg Ferrero and Rose Ellen Meyerhoff Greene. Photo by Oriol Tarridas. © Firelei Báez
About the Des Moines Art Center
The Des Moines Art Center is a vibrant, AAM-accredited (American Association of Museums) institution located in the capital city of Iowa that welcomes over 300,000 visitors annually from across the country and around the globe. Its historic campus consists of three buildings designed by major architects of the 20th century—Eliel Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Richard Meier—incorporated into the natural landscape of Greenwood Park. The Art Center is home to one of the strongest collections of 20th and 21st century art in the region, and it hosts a series of ground-breaking exhibitions and lectures each year featuring artists known regionally, nationally, and internationally. The experimental art for which the Art Center cares is reflected in its creative offerings, including a celebrated education program that prioritizes access and collaboration, an art school with studio classes for all ages, and the John and Mary Pappajohn Sculpture Park, situated on 4.4 acres in downtown Des Moines. The Art Center is committed to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are incorporated into every facet of its mission and identity.
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