Born in the Dominican Republic in 1981, the artist Firelei Báez spent her young life in the country before moving to Miami, at age eight. In 2001, she headed to New York City to study at Cooper Union and then Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. and an M.F.A., respectively. By 2012, her sculptures and works on paper and canvas began to generate significant attention: a solo exhibition came that year at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, in Reno, Nevada, followed by another in 2015, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Báez’s renown keeps growing. Her works, which often challenge the antiquated racial and class structures that exist in the Western canon, have more recently appeared at the Berlin Biennale and Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art. Now Báez’s first bronze sculpture, as well as other paintings and drawings, are at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles. —Jack Sullivan