Bodies of Color: Images of Women in the Works of Firelei Báez and Rachelle Mozman

This essay explores the photographic and film work of New York–born artist Rachelle Mozman (of Panamanian heritage) and the paintings and drawings of Dominican-born artist Firelei Báez. Both artists make use of the form, the image, the representation, and the reading of the female body. Through their imagery, the body serves as a sign for presence and invisibility, for fearlessness and fragility. The permanence of the body’s surface becomes a kind of visible text that both artists develop through their narratives. By examining specific series of works by each artists, one sees similarities in their ways of working and defining the female body and in their ways of using historical and contemporary references in the narratives in which they place these gendered bodies.