SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Gallery Wendi Norris presents Trust Memory Over History, artist Firelei Báez’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and the first time her work is being presented publicly in San Francisco. Trust Memory Over History will be on view through March 5, 2016.

The works featured in Trust Memory Over History investigate socio-political movements of black resistance across the global diaspora. By illuminating underlying links between seemingly disparate experiences, Báez traces shared iconographical systems of rebellion, ranging from the Latin American azabache, to female resistance in 18th-century Louisiana, to 19th-century socialism, to the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States. On view will be paintings and drawings made this year, including select works from the artist’s recent solo exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art as well as new portraits and works from her ongoing series titled Carib’s Jhator.

Báez’s vibrantly-colored gestural paintings on paper and linen depict female subjectivity in its varied forms, through the tropes of patterned textiles and ornamented bodies. Patterns of Resistance, a large scale painting on paper, features a crumpled piece of what appears to be blue-and-white colonial toile wallpaper. Upon careful study, it becomes apparent that the imagery is in fact an amalgam of contrasting symbols. In her portrait series, Báez uses outlines of her own silhouette to communicate the figure of the everywoman, who has no discernible features beyond omniscient eyes that directly confront the onlooker. The Carib’s Jhator works are wildly colorful and patterned figurative paintings. “Jhator” refers to the Tibetian Buddhist sky burial, the ultimate bodily release; here, Báez presents an imagined Caribbean version.

Born in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Firelei Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union’s School of Art in 2004, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, and later received an M.F.A. from Hunter College in 2010. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace. Exhibitions of her work include Bloodlines at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (on view through March 6, 2016); Prospect 3 Biennial; A Curious Blindness at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University; and Concealed: Selections from The Permanent Collection, Studio Museum in Harlem, NY. Baez’s work has been written about in The New York Times, The LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, New American Paintings, The Huffington Post and Studio Museum Magazine. In addition, she was a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award as well as the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting. Báez is also the recipient of the 2016 Chiaro Award, a fully sponsored artist residency and $15,000 cash prize for an accomplished mid-career painter residing in the U.S., given annually by the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. Her book Firelei Báez: Bloodlines, published by Pérez Art Museum Miami, includes a preface by PAMM director Franklin Sirmans, an essay by PAMM curator María Elena Ortiz, a conversation between the artist and The Studio Museum in Harlem curator Naima J. Keith, and a story by author Roxane Gay titled In the Manner of Water or Light.