Felipe Baeza receives the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Visual Arts for his studio practice and his poetic visual style. As an artist, Baeza engages multiple mediums and traditions to explore spirituality, otherness, and regeneration. 

Born in Mexico and based in the United States, Baeza often fuses mediums to explore notions of the body and plurality through the lens of a queer, migrant experience. His artistic journey and the narratives he explores in his work are deeply influenced by his own experiences. 

Baeza’s work is largely figurative. His use of fragmented body parts, labyrinthine designs, and natural and cosmic symbology represents the possibility of alternative futures and ways of being. It is about finding an authentic course for one’s self: creating a life worth living and flourishing despite the constraints of society. The juxtaposition of imagery in his works prompts the contemplation of incompleteness, or a sense of yearning. Baeza believes that the feeling of being “unfixed” echoes queer and migrant experiences: the sense that one is a stranger in a strange land. 

In his studio, Baeza embraces this unfixed state of creation, pushing aside conventional logic to find joy and frustration in the artistic process. “The work sits in an unfixed space, and I hope it manages to stay that way—avoiding rigid and linear categories through new forms while embracing unknowability as a non-horizon,” Baeza says. 

When thinking about the people who engage with his art, Baeza wants viewers to leave with a renewed perspective, experiencing the world through a different lens and embracing the richness of diverse stories.

His work not only reflects personal struggles, but ultimately serves as a catalyst for broader conversations around the human experience.

Awards & Accomplishments

Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL (2025)
JFK Airport Medallion Commission, JFK Millennium Partners and Public Art Fund, NY (2024)
Latinx Artist Fellowship, U.S. Latinx Art Forum (2023)
Visiting Artist, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO (2023)
Federico Sevilla Sierra Residency, Mullowney Printing, Portland, OR (2023)
Artist in Residence, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (2022-23)
NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven, CT (2019)
Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant Recipient (2018)
The Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship (2017)
The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation Traveling Fellowship (2017)
Lower East Side Keyholder Residency, New York, NY (2010)
Michael S. Vivo Prize for Drawing (2009)