Olamina (How do we learn to love each other while we are embattled)

Báez has long centered the hybrid spiritual and folkloric traditions of her native Caribbean in her art, while suggesting new ways to use magical stories of resistance to resolve painful histories. In recent years, the artist’s practice has been to layer her drawings and paintings on top of found sources—maps, travelogues, and other printed documents—in order to counterbalance, disrupt, or reinscribe a different reading for their pictures and texts. Here the archival source is an arcane timeline or map of the apocalypse published in J. Elwin Woodward’s The Story of the Ages from Creation to Redemption: Key to Historic and Prophetic Diagram of the World and God’s Plan of Salvation for Law Breakers (1912). Báez’s composition foregrounds Lauren Olamina, the teenaged heroine of Octavia Butler’s haunting novel Parable of the Sower (1993). Butler imagines a terrifying future for California, where, by 2024 when the action of the novel takes place, the unchecked consequences of climate change, industrialization, wealth disparity, and other calamities have rendered society severely unstable and deadly. The young protagonist must gather her few remaining companions for a difficult journey north where she envisions a new beginning inspired by her own remarkable life philosophy based on natural cosmologies and other holistic beliefs.

Báez depicts Olamina in a state of repose, borrowed in part from a 1961 photograph of a multigenerational group of female Freedom Riders at rest in a church pew as a white supremacist mob raged outside. For the artist, such moments of calm signal the incredible power, courage, and grace embodied by these women and also signify the importance of self-care in moments of grave danger. Olamina reclines atop a shimmering shag carpet that resembles a bed of anemones; the purplish hue of her skin suggests watery depths, and apart from her striking eyes, her face and torso are masked by a cascade of luscious red, pink, and white flowers. This captivating work centers the strength of feminine resistance in a world structured to diminish that empowerment.