The Modern Art Notes Podcast · Tyler Green

Firelei Báez, Black photojournalism

January 8, 2026·1 hr 49 min·10 clips

Báez turned a 19th-century cotton map vertical, hiding fluid figures that slowly reveal themselves to viewers.

The frame is curatorial. Green starts with the MCA Chicago presentation of Baez's first North American mid-career survey, then moves through its organizers, catalog, and institutional setting. The language stays exact without turning stiff. Baez's paintings and installations sit beside colonial history, the African diaspora, the Caribbean, archival matter, and layered paint that keeps fixed categories from settling too comfortably. Then the excerpt tightens. Green asks about skin tone after setting Baez beside pseudo-scientific racialization in American, European, and Spanish colonial art. It is a prepared question, not a loose prompt. He brings in Kerry James Marshall, Joshua Reynolds' Portrait of Mai, casta painting, and paintings of Native Americans and people of African descent. Baez reaches back to undergrad drawings shown in the ICA Boston presentation and treats race in Latin America and North America as harsh opposing mirrors. For her, skin tone classifications are artificial, but that does not make them weak. They still shape how bodies get read in ordinary space. Abstraction becomes part of the argument, with skin and surface pointing toward systems that tried to turn measurement into truth. Green gives the answer room to breathe. A question about technique opens into classification, artifice, and the leftover charge of pseudoscience. Late in the episode, the show points listeners toward Charlene Foggy Barnett, Dan Lears, UNLV, and a catalog whose reproduction credits alone run six pages. The production credits stay plain: Wilson Butterworth edits, Steve Roden handles sound, the Creative Commons license is named, and notes live at manpodcast.com.

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