Firelei Báez on Mining History in Joy Out of Fire

Joy Out of Fire continues the artist’s longstanding interest in representations of women, particularly Afro-Caribbean/Afro-Latina women in visual culture and history. In the exhibition, Báez features women whose legacies are preserved and maintained by the archives of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, reimagining them in conversation through imaginative portraits that incorporate materials such as reproductions of archival photographs, notes, diaries, letters, and manuscripts. In this gathering, the artist brings together women from different eras and walks of life, including important women of color whose contributions have historically been overlooked or thought of as tangential to their male counterparts.