CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/15/2022

'Firelei Báez: to breathe full and free' is NEW from Gregory R. Miller

Collecting a decade's worth of paintings, sculptural commissions, immersive installations and more than 150 works on paper, plus scholarly essays and interviews by some of the top curators and art historians of our time—including Carla Acevedo-Yates, Mark Godfrey, Legacy Russell, Thelma Golden and Eva Respini—to breathe full and free is the first major monograph on the rising NYC-based multi-media artist Firelei Báez. In her interview with the artist, Golden asks Báez how she navigates daily life. Báez responds: "Mostly just with curiosity. Knowing that I don't know certain kinds of things has been the main anchor. So, starting with a presumption that I am not the center and that I don't know, how do I then make sense of that? How do I navigate in a way that puts me in flow with the world around me? If there's a power structure that I can see is hurting someone, not leaning into it but questioning it and then being able to take it apart. I remember, in kindergarten, I was a kid who would get in the way of the bully and get beat up, because I could see that it didn't feel right to just stand by. At the time, I didn't really understand why, but now, looking back, it was my sense of awareness, and constantly wanting to shift the things around me. And a deep empathy. I grew up surrounded by very strong women who were not necessarily saints or heroes, but their strength came in a very nuanced way." Featured image is "Towards an unseen force" (2019) installed in A Drexcyen chronocommons (To win the war you fought it sideways) at James Cohan Gallery (2019).