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.
Firelei Baez is regarded as one of the most exciting painters of her generation. Her works reflect the historical narratives of the Atlantic Basin. Over the past 20 years, she has made work that explores the multilayered explorations of the legacy of colonial histories and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and beyond.
Starting around 2017, the artist has directed her practice towards large scale works in which she directly paints onto various archival materials such as maps and architectural renderings.
In 2018, she was commissioned by the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority to install two glass-tile platform-level murals and two mezzanine-level murals for the 163 St-Amsterdam Avenue subway station. The intricate, tropical patterns of the artwork, titled “The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao” (after a novel by Junot Diaz), refer to Báez’s Caribbean background and to the demographics of the neighborhood.The mural imagery includes flowers and vines of tropical and North American plant species; these complex patterns are interwoven with images of “hand symbols” and female figures in the style of Ciguapas from the folklore of the Dominican Republic. Báez describes the work as having a level of “transparency” to Dominicans in the neighborhood.
Baez is currently the subject of a traveling exhibition at MCA Chicago, which opened on 15 November 2025.
Learn more about Firelei Baez:
Diario Libre
Diario Libre
Interview with Firelei Baez
Artsy
Wikipedia
24 November 2025