Genesis Báez: Holding Water
Reception: 11/21/25 6–8PM
Báez’s pictures give delicate form to the intertwined experiences of migration, placemaking, and kinship. Born in the United States to Puerto Rican parents, Báez stages, improvises, and performs scenes for the camera that conjure the bonds, both profound and at times elusive, between the artist, her mother, and the two places they both call home. The pictures contain what the scholar Hilda Lloréns calls the “matriarchal sensorium,” or “an interpretation of the internal and external worlds through the unique experiences, bodies, and perceptive universe of women.” Báez was influenced by C. Nadia Seremetakis’ book, The Senses Still, which chronicles how perception and sensory memory are key to the preservation of knowledge and culture. Poignant gestures—a hand gently cupping a shoulder, thumbs just breaking the water’s surface—and intangible forms—light beams, vapor, shadow, night sky—travel across the images, connecting one to the other to the other and giving shape to the slipperiness, unfixedness, and permeability of the diasporic experience.
In one photograph the artist and her mother appear as staggered shadows, Báez’s mother parting her hair to begin braiding it. A swath of gossamer fabric pulled across the scene gives the fleeting, intimate ritual a dreamlike and eternal quality: it is the braiding together of picture planes, beings, histories, origins, and departures. In another image, Báez and her mother hold onto the same length of shimmering gold thread, seemingly connected through an otherworldly portal in their living room wall. Suspension is another theme that echoes across the pictures: a string, connecting mother and daughter like an umbilical cord or a lifeline; smoke hanging in the air between sisters, a shared life force and a mingling of spirits; shapeshifting water, taking the form of the vessel containing it, being lifted up into the sunlight; condensation on an airport window—water held between two states of being and a place between two homelands.
–Marina Chao, 2025
Genesis Báez is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Recent group exhibitions include You Belong Here: Place People and Purpose in Latinx Photography, Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, WI (2025); Something you cannot hold, Soloviev Foundation, New York, NY (2024); and Folding Suns, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY (2024). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Báez is a 2025 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton and the recipient of the 2022 Capricious Photo Award.
Book
Published by Capricious Publishing
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141 pages
10.5 × 12.5 in
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Dashwood Projects Print Edition
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Archival Print on Baryta paper
8.5 × 11.5 in
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2.25 × 1.375 in
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