David Rumsey Map Collection

Firelei Báez Paints on Rumsey Maps

 Artist Firelei Báez has opened an exhibition of new paintings at the James Cohan Gallery in New York City (March 5 - April 25, 2020). In many of these paintings Báez uses Rumsey Collection historical maps as the background for the works, with the maps enlarged and printed on canvases up to ten feet. David Rumsey provided the ultra high resolution map images necessary for printing at such a scale. The James Cohan Gallery describes Báez's art as work that "casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. Often depicting strong, shape-shifting female protagonists, her paintings incorporate motifs sourced from regional mythologies and historical artifacts alongside cues from science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving... For more than a decade, Báez has painted directly onto found cartographic or printed materials to disrupt the boundaries they serve to delineate. Questioning notions of past and present, mark-making and painterly gesture become means of situating subjugated personal memory and experience in dialogue with narratives of the Western tradition. The works in her exhibition carry forward this long-standing interest while upscaling source materials onto large-format canvas to allow for intervention in human-proportion." Images of her extraordinary works and the maps underlying them are shown below.

In its booth at the 2020 Armory Show in New York, the James Cohan Gallery had this additional work by Báez, Untitled (Temple of Time):

The complete press release for the Firelei Báez exhibition may be read here. All images of the art works courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery.