Every single time I come into contact with artwork made by a Caribbean artist it brings a different kind of pride and joy to my heart. Seeing the likes of Bony Ramirez’s MACHETAZO! (2021) at the MFA Boston’s “Tender Loving Care” show, Joiri Minaya’s Container series at Northeastern’s Gallery 360, and the recent “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” exhibition at the ICA / Boston completely opened me up to a new world of possibility. These artistic representations of the Caribbean experience as physical composites of time, positionality, and self-designation exist in a world where history is no longer depicted from a colonial perspective.
The first time I saw Firelei Báez’s Can I Pass? The Paper Bag to the Fan Test for the Month of July (2011) in her survey exhibition at the ICA, I thought she might have accidentally painted me. Right before my eyes was an entire wall of thirty-one faceless portraits with various curly hairstyles, bronze skin, and expressive almond eyes of a deep shade of brown, mirroring my own. These wooden panels—painted with ink, gouache, and graphite—look so much like me in fact, that on my third visit, when I joked with another museum-goer that the Hispaniola-born artist had actually made the works in my image, they believed me. And in a way, she might as well have.
But Báez didn’t actually paint me; these figures that returned my gaze are self-portraits the artist made every day for the entire month of July in 2011. The panels are assembled to reflect calendar dates and the changing silhouettes are challenged by the static white background from which their shapes emerge. The question being asked is direct: Can I pass? But rather than seeking an answer, Báez is asking us to contemplate historical notions of what it means to pass. In fact, this question is in direct reference to the paper bag test of the Jim Crow era and the fan test that has origins in the Caribbean—both meant to typify Black bodies and reward closer proximity to whiteness.
This title initially confused me because I was unfamiliar with the latter test. The fan test refers to a derogatory evaluation from the colonial period where women in the Dominican Republic would be asked to stand in front of a fan to test the coarseness of their hair. Those whose hair did not flow back in the wind failed the test. The paper bag test, on the other hand, consisted of comparing the shade of one’s skin to that of a brown paper bag—leaving those darker than the bag excluded from social gatherings and unable to “pass” for white.
What’s interesting about these self-portraits is that although we see suggestions of forms and can recognize the way these forms shift before us, we never actually see the faces behind the bags.
We know that Báez is more than capable of rendering facial features; she is a masterful painter with over fifteen years of experience under her belt. The artist opting not to show her entire face is purposeful. So what are the implications of a self-portrait that never reveals the face of the person being pictured?
Báez is leaning into the concept of opacity—a term first used in this context by Martiniquan philosopher and literary critic Édouard Glissant in his book Poetics of Relation. To retain opacity means to deliberately leave parts of yourself obscure, functioning as an oppositional way of being in comparison to the highly visible “transparency” that is required of us in Western society. In the words of Glissant, “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce”.
Báez’s omission of a highly visible figure reminded me of a small souvenir of a doll given to my mother from family visiting the homeland. Although Báez never references them directly, las Muñecas Limé—created by pottery worker Liliana Mera Limé in 1981—are handcrafted dolls that have a faceless design. The dolls are representative of the racial diversity that exists within the Dominican Republic. In creating a character that lacks explicitly definitive features, the dolls allow more room for interpretation and projection. Las Muñecas Limé gifted the people of Hispaniola with opacity—an unalienable right that we have historically been deprived of.
Art forms in the past sought to hyper-designate and segregate those on the island. Originating in the eighteenth century, casta paintings were the first depictions of mestizaje. These taxonomies typified over twenty different kinds of racial mixing, identifying the projected phenotypes and social status of those within each category. They were commissioned so the Spanish elite could begin to “understand” the concept of a multiracial society. As it stands currently, the racial caste system that exists in the Dominican Republic uses terms such as mulato, indio, y mestizo—all terms retained from traditional eighteenth century castas. Born out of the Spanish’s need and desire to name our people, castas have effectively informed and intruded upon our very existence. They decided who we were and put it in writing, leaving Dominican bodies subject to the modern forms of these racial frontiers, with the intricate stratifications getting harder to identify. The subjective nature of this system of identification births questions such as Báez’s Can I pass?, and the answer is often dependent on the perspective of whoever is making that judgment. In an attempt to classify and simplify mestizaje, the creation of castas have instead infringed upon the right to opacity and created a system of reduction. These images are limiting; they come with a sense of totality. They remove any possibility for the humans behind the images to be anything other than what they have been labeled.
The figurative form in both historical and contemporary depictions inform the narratives that surround us. Choosing to reject these depictions and their associated identifiers creates a blank slate where anything is possible. It leaves room for a new face, a new story, to emerge. It allows for the face to change, to not have to explain itself. In an interview with Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen in 2023, Báez says, “I’m very reluctant many times to show full faces because some of my primary audiences are coming from these geographies and I want to give them the freedom to experience the self without these categories… the body’s enough.”
Like las Muñecas Limé, Báez renders herself faceless. The ambiguity allows for a holistic representation of the diaspora. In all our richness and diversity, the only way to accurately depict this identity is to allow some of it to be hidden—giving us the autonomy to transform and to transcend the categories that have set the precedent for so many years.
“Firelei Báez” is on view in the Bridgitt and Bruce Evans and Karen and Brian Conway Galleries at the ICA / Boston through September 2, 2024.
