Báez’s photograph poetically expresses the tie between the artist and her origins.
Genesis Báez, Crossing Time, 2022, inkjet print, 85.1 x 61 cm (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) © Genesis Báez. Speakers: Dr. Marcela Guerrero, DeMartini Family Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art and Dr. Beth Harris
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0:00:05.0 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in the Whitney Museum of American Art, and we’re looking at a large color photograph by Genesis Báez called Crossing Time. And what we’re seeing is a figure on the lower right who has her right arm outstretched, holding one end of a golden thread. The other end is held by a shadowy figure.
0:00:25.9 Dr. Marcela Guerrero: You can divide it into two registers; there’s an upper register, a lower register. We see these very warm colors, and then lower register, we see cooler tones. But throughout the entire photograph, we see these beautiful, very dramatic shadows.
0:00:41.9 Dr. Harris: The closeness of that figure in the lower right and those dark shadows remind me in art history of the work of Caravaggio.
0:00:51.0 Dr. Guerrero: The shadows is really what ties everything together, it makes our eye move. And the thread is what draws us in. Genesis, a photographer, often uses women who are part of her family, including herself. We can guess perhaps that this could be her mother. It’s quite magical when you look at this thread and how on one side is a very clear depiction of a real thread, and then on the other side, it’s the shadow of it.
0:01:17.6 Dr. Harris: I think there’s definitely that sense of, how did she do this? Like a magic trick. And I’m thinking about the title too, Crossing Time, and I immediately think that that thread is what is connecting the different figures who are across time.
0:01:34.6 Dr. Guerrero: There’s a temporal aspect, and one could surmise that there’s also an aspect in terms of physical distance. That leads us to dig a little bit more into the biography of the photographer.
0:01:46.4 Dr. Harris: Well, we know that she was born in Massachusetts, but spent much of her childhood in between Massachusetts and the family that she had in Puerto Rico.
0:01:55.8 Dr. Guerrero: Most of her family is in Puerto Rico. As an artist from the Puerto Rican diaspora, Genesis talks about how there’s always this search for belonging, but also a sense of dislocation.
0:02:09.2 Dr. Harris: For someone growing up in two places, this divided identity where you can be, in some ways, one person in one place and another person in another place. And in Puerto Rico where her family is, those different kinds of very profound ties that go back generations that are important to one’s identity.
0:02:30.1 Dr. Guerrero: But the fact that the thread, the shadow and the real thread are connected, it’s more of a photograph of belonging, I think. There is definitely that sense of bifurcation. Genesis grew up speaking Spanish and English, and so that idea of your brain being a little split into two is something that is echoed in this photograph.
0:02:51.6 Dr. Harris: I’m noticing too the importance of hands and profiles, that we have a profile on the upper left, a profile on the lower right, and the centrality of the hands, these gestures of reaching out that seem to be really key to this photograph.
0:03:08.5 Dr. Guerrero: And the two fists that are holding the thread are so similar. The traits that you share with your mother are definitely there.
0:03:16.6 Dr. Harris: And I wonder if that shadow that is the string suggests the possibility of loss of not being able to hold on to that string that connects her.
0:03:26.7 Dr. Guerrero: I think it’s also this other idea of, how do we form ties to our place of origin? That they can also be tenuous, they might not be as concrete as a place of birth, necessarily. The ties that we see here are expressed through the use of the thread but also that play between the more real and the shadow takes it to the realm of the poetic.
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