Please join us for an evening with artist Firelei Báez in conversation with collector Pamela Joyner. Rendering her subjects in complex layers of pattern and imagery, New York-based artist Firelei Báez casts cultural and regional histories into an imaginative realm, where visual references drawn from the past are reconfigured to explore new possibilities for the future. The artist's work included in the current exhibition Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox, co-curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Dexter Wimberly, challenges colonial legacies through portraiture, depicting empowered female protagonists that defy imposed systems of containment and classification.

Born in the Dominican Republic and living and working in New York, Báez speaks to a diasporic resistance using fantasy, humor and science fiction to claim self in the midst of cultural oppression. We look forward to an enlivening conversation about the artist's practice.

Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is the subject of 2019 solo exhibitions at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; James Cohan, New York, NY; and the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL. The artist’s monumental outdoor sculpture, 19.604692°N 72.218596°W, is included in En Plein Air, the 2019 High Line Art exhibition.

Her current commission for the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is on view through November. Báez recently participated in the 2018 Berlin Biennale, and was also featured in biennials Prospect.3: Notes for Now (2014), Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial (2013), and El Museo’s Bienal: The (S) Files (2011). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Other recent solo exhibitions of Báez’s work have been presented by The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, OH; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Taller Puertorriqueno, Philadelphia, PA; and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT. Báez is the recipient of many awards: most recently, the Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship (2019), the Soros Arts Fellowship (2019), the United States Artists Fellowship (2019), the College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2018), the Future Generation Art Prize (2017), the Chiaro Award (2016), and Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors (2011).

Pamela J. Joyner has nearly 30 years of experience in the investment industry. She is the Founder of Avid Partners, LLC where her expertise has been the alternative investment arena. Currently, Joyner is focused on her philanthropic interests in the arts and education.

Joyner is a trustee of The Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Trust, chair of the Tate Americas Foundation, and a member of the Tate International Council and the Tate North America Acquisitions Committee. She is also a Member of the Director’s Circle of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a Member of the Modern and Contemporary Art Visiting Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the education arena, Ms. Joyner serves on the board of the Art & Practice Foundation.

Previously, Joyner’s philanthropic involvements have included serving as a member on President Obama’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities; a trustee of Dartmouth College and Chair of the Investment Committee; a trustee of the New York City Ballet; a Board Member of the School of American Ballet; a trustee and Co-Chair of the San Francisco Ballet Association; a Board Member of the MacDowell Colony; and a trustee of the Asian Art Museum as well as other arts and educational organizations.

‍Featured image above: Firelei Báez, Love that does not choose you (Collapse the rooms and structures that depend on you to hold them)(detail), 2018. Gouache on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago.

‍This program is presented in conjunction with the current exhibition Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox on view May 8 – August 11, 2019.Public programs at MoAD are supported in part by Target.

This program is made possible by the generous support of