Dr. Marissa Baez

Biography

Marissa Alise Baez is a multidisciplinary artist born in 1997 in Houston, Texas. They are based in the United States and their work is centered on themes of memory, ephemerality, identity, and body. Baez studied Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at Texas Woman's University, graduating with a BFA in 2019, and later obtained an MFA from Penn State's School of Visual Arts in 2021. Baez has exhibited and attended residencies nationally and internationally, in locations including Mexico City, Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Germany, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California. Their work is influenced by suppressed Mexican American history, death, ancestry, materiality, and decolonization. By engaging in conversations with Latinx and Indigenous academics and artists, Baez expands their perspective on navigating the spaces in-between, addressing intergenerational trauma and resilience of marginalized bodies through a combination of photography, performance, sculpture, and material-based installations. Their art weaves family experiences, particularly exploring their grandmother's use of Curanderismo as a means of healing and indigeneity. Baez's work focuses on life cycles and the process of transit, existing momentarily in performance and photo documentation, with projects following a linear path. Their new sculpture connects past works, reinforcing conversations about objects. Baez employs third-space rhizomatic thinking in their cosmology, featuring ash as a prominent material in their practice, which they view as a medium for connection amidst existing spaces of vortex-like pathways. The themes of resistance are reflected in the imagery of Muir trees and environmental catastrophes.

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