"Firelei Báez is a publication on the art of Firelei Báez, surveying fifteen years of work in all mediums. This lushly illustrated volume accompanies the artist's first museum survey exhibition, featuring over 40 key examples in painting, drawing, and installation. Báez has exhibited throughout the United States in prominent museum and galleries, as well as public art commissions. Although her work has enjoyed high visibility in recent years, this presentation will be the first museum survey exhibition dedicated to her art, offering audiences the full breadth of her artistic accomplishments to date. Over the last 15 years, Báez has created artwork that delves into the historical narratives of the Atlantic Basin. Her work explores the multilayered legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond. She draws on the disciplines of anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction, and social history to unsettle categories of race, gender, and nationality in her paintings, drawings, and installations. Her exuberant paintings feature finely wrought, complex, and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and saturated color, often overlaid on maps made during colonial rule in the Americas. Her works primarily center women of color, using their fashion styles, decorative elements, and gaze to assert authority. Báez's investment in the medium of painting and its capacity for storytelling and mythmaking informs all her work, including her sculptural installations, which bring this quality into three dimensions. This book will provide audiences an opportunity to gain a holistic understanding of Báez's complex body of work, cementing her as one of the most important artists of the early 21st century. This book is conceived as an opportunity for readers to delve into Báez's process and inspiration. Báez is a connective thinker who draws from a variety of fields-including history, science fiction, literature, and the history of painting-and this book provides the reader an insight to the points of connectivity that inform her work. Additionally, there are opportunities for close reading of several major artworks through focused object entries and the design will include details of paintings and shots of the artist working in the studio. This volume is partly inspired by artists' sketchbooks, and will include reproductions of the artist's preparatory sketches, source images, and lush, close-up details of her artworks" -- Provided by publisher.