DR1 Daily News - Dominican Republic

Dominican-born Firelei Baez recently became the Dominican artist with the record for an auctioned painting. Báez’s Untitled (Colonization in America, Visual History Wall Map, sold for US$1.11 million in a Christie’s New York auction, more than five times its high estimate of US$200,000. This broke the artist’s record, set earlier in the day at Phillips, when Daughter of Revolutions (2014) sold for US$645,000. Her other work, Josephine Judas GOAT (2017) had also reaped US$567,000 at Christie’s New York.

Báez was born in 1981 in Santiago de Los Caballeros to a Dominican mother and a father of Haitian descent. She was raised in Dajabón, a market city on the Dominican Republic’s border with Haiti. At the age of 8, she relocated with her family to Miami, Florida.

Báez moved to New York in 2001 where she then received a bachelor’s degree in arts from Cooper Union, a master’s in fine arts from Hunter College in 2010, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture...