"the soft afternoon air as you hold us all in a single death (To breathe full and Free: a declaration, a re-visioning, a correction)" is a multi-element installation consisting of 81 works on archival maps and book pages. Báez has long painted directly onto historical material, such as found maps, manuals, and travelogues, layering figures over them to imagine new modes of understanding inherited stories. Here, she intervenes onto printed matter culled from widely varying sources that, together, underscore streams of influence amongst interrelated histories of black independence and progress—in the Caribbean, the Americas, and globally. Taking multiple, colorful collaged forms, women are represented prominently in Báez's work as change-making protagonists who intervene onto the pages and confront the formation of history, exposing the flimsiness of hierarchies that privilege certain narratives over others. Yoruba mythology is invoked through symbolic cues such as eleke beads and shifts in palette likening the figures to Orishas, interweaving diasporic narratives from the past with the present. In its collective display, the panels and their subjects envision a future of resistance and reclamation.

Source imagery courtesy of the Library of Virginia; David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries; Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.; Lisa Unger Baskin Collection, Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; The Valentine; Research assistance by Bernita Randolph