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Serina Tabisola: welcome to Articulated, I’m Serina Tabisola and I work as an Advancement Assistant here at the Archives of American Art. This podcast receives support from the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
This is the second in a four-episode series on the visual arts and healing co-curated by Fernanda Espinosa, a National Endowment for the Humanities-Oral History Association Fellow
Each episode explores perspectives from practitioners whose work blurs the borders between nations, communities, self, nature, and time.
To listen to the first episode of this series, go back to Season 3 Episode 3.
Fernanda Espinosa: Over the past three years, the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped our understanding of physical, mental, and communal health. Through distance and isolation, we evaluated our relationships with one another, raising questions of belonging and interconnectedness beyond individual experience.
As we enter the fourth year of this public health emergency, we also approach the third anniversary of the Archives’ Pandemic Oral History Project, which comprised more than 80 short-form interviews to gauge the state of the arts at the onset of the pandemic in 2020. To commemorate that project and to reflect on how the world has evolved since, we have invited four artists to reflect on healing and belonging in their work, which we have put in dialogue with the oral history collection.
In this episode, we conjugate two visual artists from different generations whose work provided spaces of respite and reflection. At the onset of the pandemic through imaginative and generous creations.
Part one: multi-generational histories and current craft.
Firelei Báez: I am a Haitian-Dominican artist, who has lived most of her life in the US, and by, I guess many markers would be considered now like an American artist.
Fernanda Espinosa: That's Firelei Báez, our guest artist for this episode. Firelei casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm through exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations.
Firelei Báez: When I travel outside of the US—even when I travel back into the Caribbean—it's a strange in-between space where I am now an "Americana." [Laughs.] So I live, and I think, inhabit that multiple identity of existing between these spaces and feeling fully from all of them and none of them at once.
I was born in the Dominican Republic and raised right at the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti in Dajabón, Loma de Cabrera, where, as a rambunctious little kid, I would just climb trees and roll down hills and play. Nature was a very big component in my upbringing. Some of the fondest memories I have are of being in nature and playing in nature, which I think have become foundational to how I feel in the world.
I would mostly be sent to the countryside to Loma de Cabrera when there were student strikes or for the summer when my mom needed a break from us. We'd be sent to our grandmother, and aunts in Loma. But by the time I was about four and a half, as a young child before getting to go to elementary school, I remember being sent over to my grandmother's and It was about the point where my mom was going to emigrate. So that meant that for a few years, my older sister and I were away from her, stayed with our family, and a lot of adventures ensued, and a lot of really strong memories have stayed from that point.
I remember being in the elementary school in the countryside and one of the young children died by drowning, and the entire school walked single file up the mountain and went to his wake.
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And there was the thing where they would put an old school iron ore for his belly, I guess before it was a test to see if there was breath. But also, I think there was some sort of exchange for the other world to give the gift of iron over his belly. And so just being able to, as an adult see all the different symbols and the colors associated with that, that period, are pretty interesting to, like, decode both the Christian traditions and the non-normative —other belief systems, that were part of that ritual that we all just kind of took normally. That palette still shows up in a lot of my work. I think all our uniforms were all light blue. There was like a misty walking through the woods, there were, there were like paths. It wasn't like a clear road. We had to walk up paths that were carved into the mountain to walk up to that person, that child's house, home, and then walk back to school.
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Julia Santos Solomon: I am an artist. I've been creating art for about 40 years. And it is truly my calling in this life.
Fernanda Espinosa: And that's Julia Santos Solomon, a multimedia artist, designer, and educator based in Woodstock, New York. Her papers, 2020 Pandemic Oral History recording, and 2021 oral history are available on the Archives' website. Both interviews with Julia occurred during the early stages of the pandemic and were conducted remotely.
Julia Santos Solomon: And I was born in Dominican Republic and have lived in the United States all my life. My art is truly tied to my roots and where I come from and all of my experiences in life. So, I just want to establish that that is what I love, my passion. And it's how I express myself.
Mom was invited to do some athletic workshops at Maryland University because she was a good athlete, and she opted not to do that. The way that we ended up immigrating to the United States was with my aunt Tomasa, who was a teenager. So Aunt Tomasa came to the States when she was about 18 years old. And she came because we had relatives who could claim her and give her papers. So she came, and she was living with the mother of an in-law, sleeping in the pullout couch with two twin girls. And she got a job in a factory. My aunt is a really gifted seamstress. Later in life, she became a sample maker for designers on Seventh Avenue, but the work she was doing then as a teenager was rather simple. I think she says she was making like seven dollars a week back then. And, you know, after a year or two, she got lonely and decided that she didn't want to stay here, because she was the only one from our family that was in the States, and she decided she was going to go back. Then my mother said to her, "Don't come back, I want to come to you." She wanted to leave the Dominican Republic and all the chaos she was experiencing there. So my aunt did stay, and she brought Mom to the States with her.
So now, we are a three-person nuclear family. There's Grandma Gabina, my mother Lucía, and my Aunt Tomasa, and myself. That year when Mom left, I was four years old, and I do a lot of art around this story—around this part of my story—a lot. So that age was really something that was very important in my life, my fourth year. And also, that's the year that Trujillo was assassinated. So that dictatorship ended when I was four. And even though I was a little girl, I understood the commotion that was going on in the country. You know, something big had happened, and I was trying to find my bearings around it.
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Fernanda Espinosa: Part Two:
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Firelei and Julia take us through their experience of the initial months of the Covid 19 emergency and what it meant for their practice. Firelei describes her family's grounding in the Seventh Day Adventist Church or SDA and her own moral trajectory, and Julia delves into the power of grief and family connection.
Firelei Báez: Starting with my childhood, like growing up, my grandmother and aunties were SDA, and one of the foundational ethics of that kind of religion, which started off at the end of the 19th century, was when they thought the world was going to end.
So these women, in the Caribbean, vegetarians became a bit like preppers and they were always telling us it was the end of the world. Our understanding was that it was exciting. Finally, we could start anew, and so growing up I was like, fine. Anyone over 18, ancient! There's no life after 18. What are they? So I didn't count on having a life, and that was supposed to be around the time when the new millennium was going to be coming. So once the millennium came along, I was like, oh crap, I'm still alive. I have to plan. What do I want to do in this world I'm living? And that's when I was started going into community college and then I found out about New York. So it was always, even though I put that mindset aside, I said, I belong to the world, I have to find ways of navigating it and being present. This is what we have. This world is what we have to treasure. Let's stop doing this forsaking the present for this imaginary idyllic space at the expense of burning the world around us or letting the world burn around us.
So, by the time the pandemic came, I had been very, very strongly trying to be present and fight against it. But that mindset had always been present, had always been the underlying thing. So I had always, wherever I moved, enough storage to survive for three months at the least. I always have for my artwork as a painter, I always used masks and gloves and all the things that you needed for PPE, were kind of just like the everyday materials I would have to protect my lungs from the harsh chemicals I would have to use. And I would spend long weeks, if not sometimes months, where I would just be at home or in the studio working alone and very rarely having to go outside. So I was very accustomed to being indoors.
I pushed through, I made a bunch of work I just was like having a really busy schedule in the middle of the pandemic. So that felt like no break, no respite, no time to mourn, no time to like do anything. One thing I did do is that I got a car and I got very adept at driving from New York to Florida in one day to Miami. I would leave at 5:00 and I would get there at midnight, and that way I could spend like a week with my family and then get back to the deadlines at home in New York and keep working.
(space) my mom and sisters are all nurses. But that meant that she and my sister—my younger sister—were all working in like Covid wards. They were in the very heart at the center of like, the crisis, you know, blindly responding to something that they had no techniques for, no understanding of. And my older sister hasn't taken a break since it started.
She's been in Covid wards. She's always dived to the center. She's always someone that if there's crisis, she's gonna be the one who's going to respond. so I wanted to figure out like, how could I, in my work, ever offer any moment of healing or respite in that time, as a healthcare worker; there was no break for her.
Like even though I had these expedited deadlines in the studio, it was still a very luxurious space to be able to like isolate, to like not worry about what my next meal or safe space was going to be. And it was at a time when like there was all this precarity, when there were people who couldn't take time off work.
I wanted to highlight that in my work or give space, uh, for that in my work. And so there was one painting I started in my apartment when I like, couldn't commute to my studio in the Bronx. Um, and it was dedicated, not just, you know, like it actually was inspired by this one painting of freedom writers, who were getting ready to walk in the Selma Bridge, and it's these young women, it's a multi-generational scene of women and young baby girls in church pews, in their Sunday baths, in these beautiful frilly dresses, sleeping and resting on each other, and they were about to face fire the following day. They were about to just like, you know head into like a very inhospitable space. Um, the riots happened, right, you know, after that moment of rest, but that they were basically centering that rest
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before battle. It's something that was very central to a lot of the Octavia Butler, quotes. I was reading her ''Earth Seed'' series, just, you know, very, a lot of people focus on like the moment of crises, the battle point, but what are the things that prepare you to survive that moment?
And there are things that had been modeled by those elders before, and that had been centered in a lot of the formative fiction around us. How in both the real world and like in a psychic guard kind of sense, these are things that we had been geared and equipped for, and we have the people we come with have taught us those lessons. We keep surviving these horrific moments and we keep not just surviving but creating amazing, beautiful things and creating whole new cultures despite them, but only because they model these different tools for survival. So in this painting, I had this figure at a moment of luxurious rest in a lawn.
You know, a lot of times, a lot of us were stuck indoors without a green space or not feeling safe going out into green spaces, public spaces. So it was a painting that was then reproduced for the Public Art Fund. They would do, um, different posters around like bus shelters and subway, uh, cars. So for someone having to commute, having that moment of like visual rest and like a quote from Octavia Butler and a cover of her book, like maybe just different hints of different things to look at and — if not at that moment of rest, to like give you a tool for survival for later.
So a lot of the work in that time, especially the work I was making for Artist Mundi, was about ruminating on the tools given, the moments faced, and um, maybe like different connections that could be generative for the future. Yeah.
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Julia Santos Solomon: I've never experienced anything like this before. I had an experience last year where I created a mural in the town of Woodstock with the intention of creating an oasis for people because before the pandemic, we were already living through a lot of difficult times. And my intention was to create a peaceful place for people to come and refresh themselves from all the stress. What I did not understand then was that this pandemic was coming. And um, it has become that—it has become a place where people go and sit, where they'll bring their children or for a cup of coffee, and they gather themselves there. I went there immediately when the pandemic broke out and found myself doing that, and also crying in front of it. So, there's that the idea that art can succeed where politics and economics fail us. We have certainly lived and are living through a period of time like that. And I took it seriously, that it was my opportunity to do something for the community.
My work tends to be very personal. And this speaks and it comes from personal history and emotional energy. However, in 2019, I began that shift. I have done other murals. And I'm always thinking about what should this mural communicate to the people who are seeing it? And what is my intention? In my search, I always come to a place where I want the intention to be healing in some way. I have another mural in the City of Kingston, where I considered that very, very carefully. And I was thinking about diversity and energy and circulating and healing. I have been working personally on a series on, uh, the Trujillo regime, which was a 31-year dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Many Dominican artists have approached this subject. And for some reason, it became my time to explore it. However, it's a very painful [laughs] part of our history, and it's not been easy. So, when I was working on it, I had to really step back from my understanding of what happened. I was four years old when he was murdered. So, I did have some psychic recollection of that time.
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However, when the pandemic began, I could no longer access that part of me. It closed down. And I had to accept that I would have to do minor things in my studio, like restore work or organize my research, you know, my photography. I had to do some different things.
And when the pandemic hit, um, I lost two extended relatives early in March. And then, three weeks later, we lost another two, in April. And I have never experienced a time where grieving for lost ones was limited. There was nowhere I could go. I couldn't be with my family. And I'll be honest, I'm still processing those deaths. So, what I did was I approached a church in Woodstock, and I had a conversation about feeling that I had lost part of my humanity because I could not worship; I could not grieve these deaths. And out of that conversation came a very different project, which is the one that I'm involved with now. And it's called In Memoriam. And what we did was, we created a large banner that said, you know, if you've lost someone to COVID, we would like to honor them.
but what I want to explain about this project is that even though I'm the person who's painting and I'm the person who originated this concept, there's many hands behind it. You know, there's the person who got funding, so could buy materials. There's the pastor who did a service on Facebook, and she and I are constantly in conversation. She receives the names. There's a woodworker who made these crosses that I had designed. There are two grandmothers, one who primed the crosses, the other one who painted them white and delivered them to me. And then I put those names on the crosses and install them. When I install them, I feel, I feel the loss when that cross goes into the ground. Not just my loss, but people I don't know, I feel it.
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Fernanda: Part three: The work of beauty and belonging.
Firelei Báez: so part of my education was learning to divest myself from the things that hindered my voice and really re-appreciate the things that were helping within that. So then I did the most figurative work I could ever think of, and a time when it was still very much about abstraction But at that point it just seemed very taboo. So I made these really tenderly rendered portraits of women within natural hair communities, uh, reveling in their hair, but also bringing in some of the stories that I had grown up with as a child.
So they would always tell us that if your hair is so tangled or so unkempt, birds will come and make nests out of them, you know: “Van a hacer un nido,” and the worst thing that could happen to you as a human soul was to have your hair taken by a bird and incorporate it into a nest in the sky because you'd be stuck in limbo between heaven and earth.
So that you're this idea that every part of your body is inherently connected to your soul. So always being. Self-aware, first of all, but also in full respect of other actors or agents within the environment that had the ability to create equilibrium or unbalanced.
So I grew up with a very strong understanding of, like, things in nature, having their own will and volition, and being mindful and respectful of that. So the story, the drawings are these grisaille portraits of these women with these birds kind of picking at their hair and nesting and making do. Uh but one thing that I didn't realize at the time, when I was making them and that looking at the work of someone like Amy Sherald, makes me more aware of, is that I was always conscientious of keeping them at a specific gray balance, and not having the chiaroscuro be too, too dark or too light.
It was about how do you navigate as a person who exists in between different racial spaces? So they're like these silver point drawings trying to explore race. So I wanted to bring or acknowledge that codification, into the figuration, even, the curl of the hair, anything like that. So those drawings were the beginning of trying to merge both spaces.
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Julia Santos Solomon: By the time I got to Anacaona, I was back to the form, to painting form, not just recording where my eye went, and she has full color. I used a model for the main figure, and that was a true return to my roots, [laughs] meaning my training. And when I first made her, I did it for rather personal reasons, you know, admiring Anacaona and her place in our history. And growing up looking at her sculpture, which was at the base of a big sculpture of Columbus, who I disliked tremendously. I disliked Columbus, but I loved her form. I mentioned that I was honoring a song by Toña la Negra from México, and she was imploring painters to paint black angels and black cherubs. Her song was from the '40s. And I felt a responsibility to honor that call. So Anacaona, who's all brown, she was a very voluptuous woman, very round with curves and hips and long hair. She's very very beautiful in that way. And there is a black mermaid behind her, and an even deeper-toned cherub in the water, and the cherub is on a little dolphin.
When I made that picture, I felt happy that I had honored the song. But what's happened over the years is that it has become an image of interest to a lot of people because of its roots. And it is very, very large; it's five by seven feet.
So that was the first full body of work that I did here, you know. And a lot of the first images before Anacaona, they were nostalgic images.
So that's how Anacaona came to be, but she was the fullest color. She was all color. There was no black-and-white in it. And I experimented; I put some glitter on it and wanted, you know, to—I'm always throwing—it's like cooking, you know, I'm always [laughs] throwing something else in the pot I want to experiment with. So that one has glitter. And you know, many years later, I ended up with gold leaf, so maybe that was [laughs] the beginning of my interest in luminosity, but it's very funny to me anyway. But I did, you know. I experiment all the time.
Yes. When I returned to the United States, I continued to paint tropical landscapes. You know, this time, I was painting them in the United States—from memories, some from photographs—but the important thing is that the sense of color and light and air that I had captured on the island, I was still able to do. And there was something satisfying about that for me.
There was a huge, huge painting, a six-by-six that I had begun in the Dominican Republic, and then I brought it to the States. And when my grandmother was dying, my grandmother who raised me, I could only deal with my emotions by painting, with her transitioning between life and death. That large painting was up on my wall, and I decided to make a painting for her called Passageway for Gabina. And what I did was I created a path through this palm tree grove, which I simplified. I simplified the grove, made less trees. And I painted mountains in the background, which is where she was born. She was born in the mountains in the Dominican Republic. And so I created a path from the grove to the mountains, and there's a lot of low-growing vegetation. That was a painting that was started in the island but finished in the US.
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Firelei Báez: if I am intelligible to these spaces, the most I can give is hyper specificity and an abstract painting, especially the way that I make them, which is like, I'll pour material into the ground and I'll carve out and I'll add and subtract.
I am giving you the width of my arms.
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I'm giving you the extent of my body. the environment itself, how humid or dry the air is, what kind of bumpy ground I was painting in. All these things are indelible markers of me being a being in space and they're etched onto a material with material onto a surface.
If I try to, I think I get into trouble when you try to just explain and explain and explain. Like, I'm me. Don't you see me? I have this hair. I'm this high, I'm this wide. Don't you recognize me? Like I belong to this group and this group and this group. Don't you recognize me? And it's people can conceptualize that sometimes.
You know, I had this conversation with Roxanne Gay. I was lik if only people had the education, then they could empathize. Empathize maybe there'd be less racism if people knew like of all the redlining, or they knew how generational like loss had happened. And she was no, no, no. People have that education. They know. They just choose to look aside. And so that was a point of like extreme sadness for me to think that the world knows, and chooses not to do differently, but I feel maybe an abstraction, it's almost like an archaeological study or like you can navigate under similar parameters, hopefully. I don't know. It's a very hopeful way of thinking.
And the only way you can have someone be that generous is to have them have a deep dive into something. So, I keep doing both. I keep doing like for the people who know and for people who speak my same language, my same emotion, they can find resonance within a certain figuration. For people who don't have that same valence, they can then navigate some other way. I just keep trying to like give as much room for people to resonate as I can, with what I have.
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Serina Tabisola: This podcast is produced by Ben Gillespie and Michelle Herman at the Archives of American Art. It was edited by the team at Better Lemon Creative Audio
Our theme music comes from Sound and Smoke composed by Viet Cuong and performed by the Peabody Wind Ensemble with Harlan Parker conducting.
For show notes, work cited, and additional resources, visit aaa.si.edu/articulated.
The Archives is especially grateful to Fernanda Espinosa for curating this episode, and to Firelei Báez for sharing her insight and energy. A special thank you goes to Julia Santos Solomon for her generosity and boundless spirit.
If you enjoy ARTiculated, please consider rating and sharing it.
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution is a nonprofit organization that relies on donations from individuals like you to sustain our ongoing operations and special programs like ARTiculated. To support our work, please visit aaa.si.edu/support. Thank you.
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