November 2, 2023 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Wangechi Mutu and Firelei Báez, two internationally recognized artists, will sit down for a once-in-a-lifetime conversation as they delve deep into unexplored territories within their artistic practices.
AMFA’s Undivided series redefines the traditional conventions of an Artist Talk by pairing contemporary artists together to interview each other, creating nothing less than an unforgettable dialogue.
Mutu and Báez are both world-builders, creating hybrid art forms that balance relevant topics with fictional universes and fantastical landscapes.
Live open captioning will be available during this event.
Photo of Firelei Báez courtesy of the artist. Photo by Sunny Leerasanthanah.
About the Artists
Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu’s work deals with the very idea of human representation; how we perceive and reproduce images of what we believe we are, how we view others and create images of what we think of them. In her ongoing conversations with figuration, what Mutu’s work looks at our value systems in Art and beyond, that either obscure or elevate our image and reflections.
Internationally renowned for a practice that encompasses various techniques and mediums including sculpture, painting, film, installation and collages, Wangechi Mutu’s work features female hybrid creatures and vivid dystopian dreamscapes.
Mutu has participated in several major solo exhibitions in institutions worldwide, most recently, Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined at the New Museum; Wangechi Mutu at Storm King Art Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Façade Commission: Wangechi Mutu, The NewOnes, will free Us; and at The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Legion of Honor Museum Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You listening?
Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez casts diasporic histories into an imaginative realm, re-working visual references drawn from the past to explore new possibilities for the future. With a goal to reclaim power, Báez overlays figuration, symbolic imagery, and abstract gesture onto large-scale reproductions of found maps and documents. She populates these historically-loaded representations of space with change-making creatures—whose hybrid forms incorporate folkloric and literary references, textile pattern, plantlife, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance—to present fictional alternative universes.
Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2020, Báez is shortlisted for Artes Mundi 9, and will be the subject of a solo presentation at the ICA Watershed, Boston, MA this summer.
In 2019, the artist had solo exhibitions at the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando, FL, the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Undivided: Wangechi Mutu / Firelei Báez is supported by Anita Davis and the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
