LOS ANGELES, CA.- The artist Felipe Baeza knows something about waiting for the bus. Growing up in Chicago in the 1990s, he rode the city bus on his own starting around age 9. Going to college at Cooper Union in New York to study art, he took the bus or subway from his home in Spanish Harlem to get to class. This year, living in Los Angeles for a period without a car, he’d take a bus — or two or three — to get across town, though he sometimes gave up after an absurdly long wait and called an Uber.

Starting Aug. 9, the artist, whose home base is Brooklyn, will be giving people something to think about during their own public transportation journey, or purgatory as the case may be. As part of a Public Art Fund program designed to reach people where they live or commute, Baeza will have eight of his mixed-media, collagelike paintings reproduced on some 400 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York, Boston and Chicago as well as Querétaro and Léon in Mexico. They will also appear on digital kiosks and newsstands in Mexico City.

“People assume I don’t drive because of my illegal history,” said Baeza, who immigrated from Celaya, Mexico, unauthorized, when he was 7 and now has DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status. “I just never had the desire or interest. I like walking or taking the bus or train. Navigating a city by public transportation changes the way you experience the landscape, the world.”

And his paintings for the project — fantastic, ritualistic images of human bodies in different stages of transformation or regeneration — touch on the power of mobility. Speaking from a small office-like studio at the Getty, where he had a 9-month residency ending in June, Baeza called his subjects “unruly forms” or “fugitive bodies” who don’t conform to norms or abide by laws. Some seem to be morphing into sea creatures or mythic birds; others are on the cusp of flight.

Many of his figures are fragmented, missing legs or torsos. But they have long, wraparound arms, Virgin Mary-like shrouds or spiky energy fields that make them seem powerful and protected. “Violence is not my intention,” said Baeza. “Even if I’m just showing a head, I don’t see it as a decapitated figure but as a full body — a body in the process of becoming.”

Baeza’s artwork also resists a simple migrant-as-victim narrative, said Los Angeles curator César García-Alvarez, who gave the artist an early survey at the Mistake Room in L.A. in 2020 and included five of his works in a homage to Hélio Oiticica at Lisson Gallery in New York this summer. “Since he’s a poc artist, queer artist, immigrant artist, there’s this expectation that the work has to be intensely political, critiquing the systems of oppression,” the curator said. “But I think Felipe’s work is also remarkably and unapologetically beautiful; it’s aspirational and expansive.”

Along with the Catholic iconography, including plenty of thorns, the new artworks draw on displaced Mesoamerican antiquities that the artist has found in American museum collections — objects that, while not necessarily looted, have been extracted from their original cultures and context. He dove deeper into the subject during his Getty Research Institute residency, borrowing stacks of museum catalogs and covering a studio wall with photocopies of startling images, from an Olmec mask to a Nazca potbellied drum.

Some of these Mesoamerican forms show up in the new work, including an almost cartoonish Jalisco pot from the Art Institute of Chicago, identified as “an open-necked vessel in the form of a human head, possibly deceased.” (“It looks very alive to me,” the artist said). Then there’s the spiky, elaborate headdress adorning a Remojadas ceramic at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Baeza adapted to crown one of his figures.

These displaced antiquities, stuck in the U.S., offered a way of “thinking about the immigrant experience,” said Baeza, who under DACA restrictions must apply for “advance parole” to travel internationally. “People come to a new country unable to get a work permit or driver’s license or to move freely, but even within those modes of suspension, you learn to thrive and survive. I like to think these objects are doing the same thing, thriving despite the constraints.”




Baeza’s composition process typically begins with tinting his own paper: pooling pigment and water on a big plastic sheet on the ground and pressing paper against it to absorb the color in “uncontrolled” ways. He then mounts one of those unevenly stained or streaked sheets onto a small wood panel that serves as a canvas, while he cuts up other hand-dyed sheets of paper (and sometimes magazine pictures) into smaller pieces to compose his otherworldly figures. These cutup pieces are then embedded into wood that the artist has carved out using printmaking tools — “it’s like a mosaic technique,” he offered.

The result is a highly layered artwork — somewhere between painting, printmaking and collage. Critics call his work “intimate,” suggesting one can sense the artist’s careful process of mark-making.

One challenge with the supersize bus-shelter reproductions is maintaining a sense of intimacy and texture. While the original artworks measure 16 inches by 12 inches at most, the bus-stop prints span nearly 6 feet by 4 feet. Some delicately colored backgrounds on the original artworks in the series end up looking like concrete.

“In a perfect world, I’d love for the texture to come through,” Baeza said. “But I was very satisfied with the final proofs I saw at the end.”

His training in printmaking helped. Baeza applied to Cooper Union because it was free — “my only route to higher education” — and was drawn to the visceral pleasures of making etchings and woodcuts. Graduating in 2009, he landed a “dream job” working at Two Palms in New York, creating silk-screens alongside celebrated artists like Mel Bochner. In 2016 he joined the MFA program at Yale, where he discovered that one of his collagraph plates — a map of the U.S. that he drew on and built up with twine — was more compelling in its own right than inked to make prints. He gained art business know-how as part of the first cohort in Titus Kaphar’s residency program, NXTHVN, in New Haven, Connecticut. “I became a studio rat,” he said. “The networking side was also hugely helpful.”

By that time Baeza was busy making his “unruly” mixed-media figures, with several appearing in his 2020 survey at the Mistake Room. Though the pandemic shut down that show, Cecilia Alemani, a leading curator, was able to see it and included Baeza in her 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” alongside Surrealist greats like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo (who were brought together in exile in Mexico in the 1940s).

The two painters were known for infusing their works with mysticism. In turn, Nicholas Baume, the director of Public Art Fund, saw the Biennale and was struck by the “materiality and spirituality” of Baeza’s work there. “I also recognized that what he is doing is very relevant to current conversations about identity and outsider-ness, what it means to not be a citizen, not be a heterosexual male and have a sense of living somehow in between spaces.”

Starting in 2017 in New York with Ai Weiwei’s exhibition “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” the Public Art Fund’s bus-shelter program now takes place roughly twice a year. The most recent commission, by Aïda Muluneh, was the first to go international, and its success led Baume to propose a Mexico presence for Baeza’s work. His team lined up bus shelters in Querétaro and Léon, not far from Baeza’s birthplace, as well as the kiosks in Mexico City.

And there is a good chance the artist will be able to see this project in Mexico. “I’m hoping to take a trip there in September,” said Baeza, who received “advance parole” to travel for work reasons through November. “All of my family except my parents are still in Celaya. It would be amazing to experience my art with them, as they’ve never seen it in person.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.