Felipe Baeza

Finding Home in My Own Flesh

The mural Finding Home in My Own Flesh acknowledges the Coachella Valley as both a border region and a queered space, and honors immigrants and queer people of color who have been an integral part of the region’s story. While these communities have long populated the area, they’re often omitted from its better known histories. Finding Home in My Own Flesh, depicting two hands enveloping a cloud of vines and flowers, speaks to the erasure of marginalized peoples from both official narratives and our collective imaginaries. Gesturing to a person that will soon take full form, Finding Home in My Own Flesh recognizes those who are often unseen and intentionally erased. Finding Home in My Own Flesh functions as a memorial to non-conforming bodies and their movement across spaces— both past and present—that nurture and uplift them.

Felipe Baeza’s (Guanajuato, Mexico, 1987) practice is equal parts confrontation of violent pasts and a tribute to people whose sense of personhood is litigated and defined by those in power. His “fugitive bodies” appear in different states of becoming and at times are even abstracted to the point of invisibility. These bodies bear witness to the lives of racialized, queer, migrant, and otherly abled subjects whose existence transgresses the limitations of identity.

Finding Home in My Own Flesh
33.825587, -116.546892
Between West Elm and the Hyatt Palm Springs on N. Palm Canyon Dr.
Palm Springs, California, USA
Desert X 2021

The artist and Desert X would like to thank the following for their generous support in making this project possible: Diane V Allen, Cerámica Suro, and Grit Development.