Marissa Alise Baez
- Adjunct Lecturer, Art Foundations and Sculpture
- Email mab1536@psu.edu
- Pronouns They/Them
Biography
Marissa Alise Baez was born in 1997 in Houston, Texas. Based in the United States, Baez is a multidisciplinary artist interested in memory, ephemerality, identity, and the body. They studied Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at Texas Woman’s University and graduated with a BFA in May 2019. Baez graduated with an MFA at Penn State School of Visual Arts in 2021. Baez has exhibited and attended residencies nationally and internationally including Mexico City, Texas, Pennsylvania, Washington, Germany, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California
Marissa Baez's work is influenced by suppressed Mexican American history, death, ancestry, material, and decolonization. Conversations with Latinx and Indigenous academics and artists led Baez to expand their perspective on navigating a state of in-between. They address intergenerational trauma and the resilience of marginalized bodies through a combination of photography, performance, sculpture, and material-based installations. Baez weaves in family experiences and looks to their grandmother's use of Curanderismo to explore healing and indigeneity.
Their work exists in different life cycles and focuses on the process of transit. Art pieces can exist momentarily through performance and photo documentation. Projects do not follow a linear path. A new sculpture (photo or performance) connects to past work by reinforcing the conversation between the objects. Baez applies third-space and rhizomatic thinking to their cosmology. Ash is a prominent material that is found constantly in their practice. They view this material as a connection to mediumship, existing within space as vortex-like pathways.
I often look at the resistance of Muir trees, and despite environmental catastrophes, they still grow.