In the Art of Firelei Báez, Our Histories Are Ready for a Review

Emma Willard was a feminist pioneer who pushed early for equality in education for white women and established herself as a reputable artist who combined her love of illustration with her love of pedagogy. She created inventive visualizations of historic events, which she described as “memory palaces.” In 1845, later in her life, Willard turned a drawing of a sprawling tree into a wall map depicting American history. It is perhaps her best-known illustration, which still appears as the cover of textbooks and is available, as a print.

Almost 200 years later, that map serves as a canvas for the artist Firelei Báez (pronounced FEER-eh-lay), who used the source material as inspiration for her own cosmology. Willard’s rambling tree reminded Báez of an underwater creature, so, for her solo show at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea, she painted a large, milky white jellyfish whose lanky tentacles flop onto the tree’s bark, which is inscribed with the dates of “Columbus’ Discovery 1492,” “Pilgrims landing” and “Confederacy begins.”

In her own work, which Báez named “Not even unalterable limitations (or a transformational topology for remembering Willard’s Chronographer of American History),” a chaos of color erupts below the gelatinous creature, with protrusions of legs and feet, some comfortably blotting out the colonial past. Others use the base of the map for leverage, as if to flee the violence implicit in the timeline. The figure represents someone — or something — “coming into being, unruly, mid-formation,” Báez said.