Eliana Willis

For the Caribbean-born artist Firelei Báez, her childhood creativity was associated with causing trouble and upending the status quo. They even called her “I don’t know if it was ‘The Demolisher’ or ‘The Hellion,’” she says in an exclusive new video interview.
Filmed as part of the new season of Art21’s series New York Close Up series, the painter delves into her upbringing on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, explaining how it informed her lusciously detailed works which blend mythical stories from folklore, scientific taxonomy, and a range of perspectives from the African diaspora.
The beauty in Báez’s work, which often centers on the female figure, is underpinned by a current of something sinister. But the artist sees the bodies she paints as misunderstood. In the interview, Báez describes the Dominican mythological trickster figures, the ciguapas, who appear as cunning seductresses with backward feet that literally lead people down the wrong paths. 
“She was meant to be something that made us so fearful, that we could be quiet for long enough to be groomed into civility,” Báez explains. But what if we could shift that perception and celebrate these figures as individuals?

Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Firelei Báez: An Open Horizon (or) the Stillness of a Wound.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.

“The understory,” Báez continues, “is they are highly independent, they’re self-possessed, and they feel deeply.” In her painting Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde) (2020) the figures are represented not as running amok, but shape-shifting, morphing between species, emphasizing the false notion that identity is fixed. 
Beginning in July 2021, the artist will present her largest sculptural installation to date at Boston’s ICA Watershed, which imagines archaeological ruins from Haiti that have cropped up in the bustling city. Drawing on Boston’s proximity to water and its history of revolution, Báez plans to evoke ideas of international exchange, culture, and identity.
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Firelei Báez” will be exhibited at ICA Watershed from July 3 through September 6, 2021. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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Improvisational quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins was virtually unknown by the general public during her lifetime—an anonymity she not only welcomed, but carefully cultivated. Now, with two new Bay Area shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, the virtuosic talent likely has more work on view at one time than ever before. 
There’s just one catch—and it’s one that makes growing the public’s understanding of Tompkins’s work, not to mention her market, a unique challenge. The artist had a single primary patron who assembled a large collection of her work—and donated it en masse to one museum. How do you grow a legacy, and a collector base, when an oeuvre is so centralized?
Tompkins, whose real name was Effie Mae Howard (the pseudonym was a privacy safeguard), was born in 1936 to a many-membered sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas. Though she learned to quilt at an early age, it wasn’t until her mid-40s, working as a nurse in the Northern California town of Richmond, that she embraced the craft as more than a hobby.  
She would, for the next 25-plus years until her death in 2006, churn out hundreds of quilts, many intricate enough in their control of color and jazzy sense of composition to draw comparisons to the great abstractionists of the modern era.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (c. 2002). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“Tompkins’s work, I came to realize, was one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments, giving quilt-making a radical new articulation and emotional urgency,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently wrote of her experience seeing Tompkins’s work for the first time in 1997. “I felt I had been given a new standard against which to measure contemporary art.”
This snippet was one of many glowing passages in Smith’s 4,300-word review of Tompkins’s “triumphal retrospective” currently installed at BAMPFA. (The museum is currently closed due to California’s public-health protocols; it’s expected to reopen in the spring.) The article is one of the most rapturous pieces of criticism you may ever read. And she’s not the only one to consider Tompkins in such rarified air.
The demand for Tompkins’s work is as great as it’s ever been, but the supply is all but non-existent. That’s because her legacy grew late and fast; by the time her name was known by a larger audience, the majority of her work had been scooped up by a single enthusiastic collector named Eli Leon. He bought the works directly from Tompkins for what some estimate may have been a few thousand dollars each. 
So enthralled with Tompkins’s work was the collector that he asked for as much as $50,000 per piece from anyone who wanted to buy one from him—a whopping figure for an artist who was, at the time, a relatively unknown quantity. Because of this, Leon sold few. Before passing away in 2018, he arranged for his collection of quilts—including some 500 pieces by Tompkins—to be bequeathed to BAMPFA. 
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (date unknown). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

Today, very few of the artist’s pieces are in private hands, and none have ever appeared at auction, according to Artnet’s Price Database. They’ve only appeared in galleries a handful of times—which is what makes the current show of Tompkins’s work at Anthony Meier in San Francisco so noteworthy.
Eleven Tompkins quilts make up the exhibition, which Meier acquired directly from Tompkins’s family. (Meier says he doesn’t know how many more are out there, but he doubts there are any major untapped troves.) The price for each one hovers around the mid-to-high five-figure mark, the gallerist tells Artnet News, making Leon’s once-astronomical asks now seem reasonable. 
The show hasn’t sold out yet, but Meier says interest is coming from a much broader range of people than the gallery typically attracts. 
“If you combine the kind of praise that she has been accorded by people like Roberta Smith, with the incredibly limited supply and the kind of self-evident beauty of the work—it’s got three huge things going through it,” says Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s longtime director and chief curator who organized the show. (Rinder retired in 2019.) “I’ve never been involved in the art market, thank goodness, but my gut feeling is that they’re worth a lot of money.” 
Because of that, Rinder says, the museum’s one-of-a-kind collection comes with a great deal of responsibility—a responsibility to shepherd Tompkins’s legacy, to both protect her life’s work and share it with as many people as possible. (Tompkins does not have a formal estate, as many late artists do.) What’s the prudent way to proceed?
Installation view of “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020-21. Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“This is a very, very important question for the museum right now,” the former director explains.
Rinder sees two possible directions in which the institution could go. One would be to hold onto all of Tompkins’s pieces and establish a research center dedicated to the artist, allowing scholars the opportunity to study the collection as a whole body of work even if it means limiting the public’s access to it. The other would be to strategically disperse the collection to other museums—be it through sale, long-term loan, or gift—in an effort to make it widely accessible, if decentralized. 
When asked which direction he would take, were he not retired, Rinder says this is an instance where you can “have your cake and eat it too.” 
“There are so many [of Tompkins’s artworks in the collection] that you could keep a core group and send the others out into the world. That way you’d be able to accomplish both things,” he says. “That’s what I would do.”
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When artist Shaun Leonardo was 21, his football coach once tried to amp him up by saying: “I want you to play like they just let you out of Riker’s.”
That off-the-cuff remark has stuck with Leonardo ever since, and informed his multidisciplinary practice, which probes notions of identity foisted upon Black and brown people.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its “New York Close Up” series, the Queens-born Leonardo speaks frankly about his experiences as both an athlete and an artist of color, and how he came to understand his identity through the impressions others had of him.
“As a young man… you don’t have the wherewithal or the tools to absorb that in a healthy manner,” he says of the incident with his coach. “I’m 40 years old and I’m still thinking about that moment.”
Much of Leonardo’s work deals with societal expectations of masculinity associated with sports. At one point during the interview, the artist pantomimes punching an invisible opponent, as he does in his early video works El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man (2006) and Bull in the Ring (2008).
“I was offering the spectacle of violence and that identity of hyper-masculinity and aggression that is so often anticipated from a Black body,” he says. “We move through the world and serve as a mirror for white people’s projections.”

Still from Bull in the Ring (2008). Courtesy of Shaun Leonardo, archival media courtesy of Brad L. Cooper.

The artist recounts once seeing an image of Trayvon Martin and experiencing the recognition of how he, too, could be perceived by the outside world. That realization informed much of the drawings included in Leonardo’s new show, “The Breath of Empty Space,” at the Bronx Museum, which focuses on high-profile news stories about Black and brown men struggling with systemic violence, such as Martin, as well as lesser known incidents of police violence dating back to the 1970s.
When it comes to preconceived notions that white American have about their fellow Black and brown citizens, Leonardo says, “discovering and learning and finding ways to distort that image, to portray and feel deeply a fuller self that is not contained within these projections or these stereotypes. That has been my mandate.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space” is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through May 30, 2021. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

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Thanks to an unexpected bequest, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art now boasts the largest collection of works by the Mannerist painter and nun Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596–1676) outside the artist’s native Italy.
Upon hedge-fund manager Errol M. Rudman’s death last year, he surprised the Met with a gift that included three works by Caccia, whose art is rarely represented in US museum collections—or even outside of the convent in Moncalvo, Italy, where she lived and worked.
“I knew next to nothing about her when the gift came to us,” David Pullins, the Met’s associate curator in the department of European painting, told Artnet News. “Obviously, it’s extremely exciting.”
Caccia’s father, Guglielmo Caccia, trained her as an artist and she went on to use her work to support her religious community. A convent was constructed as an extension of the family home and painting became an important part of its income.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Flowers in a Grotesque Vase (c. 1635). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Caccia’s work made something of a splash last May when a still life of birds set a record auction result of £212,500 ($264,350)—more than 14 times the pre-sale estimate. Nevertheless, the artist wasn’t exactly high on the Met’s shopping list, “because of the rarity of the works and the difficulty of attributing those work that do come on the market,” Pullins explained.
But her work falls in line with the Met’s goals to expand its holdings both of works by women artists and of still life paintings. The three donated pieces include two still lifes and one religious scene, as first reported by Art Herstory.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Still life of birds, including a marsh tit, chiffchaff, chaffinch, blue tits, goldrest, lapwing and a great tit. Courtesy of Sotheby’s London.

“The Redmond collection is really evidence of a focused kind of collecting that may not be in the multi-million-dollar category, but can absolutely help fill out the story of European painting,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia still lifes made their public debut at the Met in December. They are currently on view in “A New Look at Old Masters,” the newly reinstalled European paintings galleries at the top of the museum’s grand staircase.
Installation view of “A New Look at Old Masters” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This condensed presentation of works from the Met’s Old Master collection unveils the results of the first phase of a project to improve the museum’s natural lighting, and features Caccia—along with Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Basket of Fruit (1620), also donated by Rudman—on a wall dedicated to 17th-century still lifes.
Adding Caccia’s work to the display “helps to highlight the acquisition last year of a floral still life by Clara Peeters, a Flemish woman—a beautiful work, but intensely painted in a very different way,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia paintings are “textbook examples of her work,” he added. “Flowers in a Grotesque Vase is everything that she does—this very meticulous individuation, treating each strand of flowers independently. It results in this very graphic abstract reduction of form. That is part of the reason that her work appeals to a contemporary aesthetic.”
Clara Peeters, A Bouquet of Flowers (c. 1612). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Howard S. and Nancy Marks, Friends of European Paintings, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill Gifts, Gift of Humanities Fund Inc., by exchange, Henry and Lucy Moses Fund Inc. Gift, and funds from various donors.

Still life, of course, was historically one of the more common genres for early women painters, who were typically denied access to live models and formal training alongside male students. Scholars now believe that, like many other women artists of the era, Caccia has had a significant number of her works misattributed to men—which partially accounts for their rarity.
That includes the Met’s third Caccia work, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625), previously thought to be the work of her father. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that “she was probably reusing drawings and designs by her father for the figures,” Pullins said. But the painting’s many still life elements, especially the goldfinch and the profusion of flowers—Caccia’s trademark—point compellingly to her hand.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Despite the relatively small number of known paintings by Caccia, the artist’s work is relatively well-documented compared to that of some of her female contemporaries—even within the Moncalvo convent.
Art historians have found that two sisters, for instance, were allowed to enter religious life with a reduced dowery “because they were sufficiently talented in painting and it looked like they would help the income of the convent,” Pullins said.
“There are a number of artists in the period where we know that a daughter or a sister was a painter. We know it archivally, but it’s very hard—if not impossible—to attribute works to them,” he added, citing Caccia’s contemporary Lucrina Fetti, a nun and sister of artist Domenico Fetti, for whom no known works have been definitively identified.
As the art world looks to uncover the careers and artistic output of these forgotten female Old Masters, the surge of interest in their work has led to a shift in the art market. Pop star and fashion designer Victoria Beckham has even been helping Sotheby’s promote the category at auction.
Now, Caccia’s canvases may be the most significant of the Rudman bequest, rather than a small-scale copper work The Flight Into Egypt (c. 1664) by Carlo Maratta. “Twenty years ago, the Carlo Maratta would have been the knock out. He was a very important Baroque artist working in Rome, and we had no works by him,” Pullins said.
Today, works by early women painters are among the most sought after by the Met, which is looking to continue building on a foundation that includes one work by Margaretha Haverman (c.1693–c. 1739), one by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652), a pair of pastels by Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), at least three Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) sculptures, and a newly attributed Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614).
When it comes to Old Master donations now, “marketwise,” Pullins said, “one would much prefer it be by a woman.”
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