Saya Woolfalk (born 1979,
Gifu City
is a city located in the south-central portion of Gifu Prefecture, Japan, and serves as the prefectural capital. The city has played an important role in Japan's history because of its location in the middle of the country. During the Sengoku ...
,
Japan) is an
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
artist known for her
multimedia
Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradit ...
exploration of
hybridity, science, race and sex. Woolfalk uses
science fiction
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...
and fantasy to reimagine the world in multiple dimensions.
Currently represented by Leslie Tonkonow gallery, she was a graduate advisor at the
Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA critic at
Parsons School of Design in 2012 and a visiting artist at
Montclair State University
Montclair State University (MSU) is a public research university in Montclair, New Jersey, with parts of the campus extending into Little Falls. As of fall 2018, Montclair State was, by enrollment, the second largest public university in New ...
in 2012 and 2013. Woolfalk was an adjunct professor at Parsons from 2013 to 2018.
Early life and education
Woolfalk was born in Gifu City, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a mixed-race African American and white father. She grew up in
Scarsdale, New York and has described that herself as "binational" as a child because of her early childhood in Japan, along with frequent visits back to the country after moving to the United States.
She has expressed that this "binational" background is very influential to her, making themes of hybridity very prominent in her work.
Woolfalk was educated at
Brown University (B.A. Visual Art and Economics 2001) and earned her M.F.A. in Sculpture at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...
in 2004. Woolfalk moved to New York in the 2006, to participate in the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
Independent Study Program.
Career
Since serving as an artist-in-residence at the
Studio Museum in Harlem from 2007 to 2008,
[ Woolfalk has exhibited her work at the ]Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporar ...
, Studio Museum in Harlem, Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Weatherspoon Art Museum
The Weatherspoon Art Museum is located at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is one of the largest collections of modern and contemporary art in the southeast with a focus on American art. Its programming includes fifteen or more ...
, Greensboro
Greensboro (; formerly Greensborough) is a city in and the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, third-most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte, North Car ...
, NC and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a not-for-profit institution in the Museum District, Houston, Texas, founded in 1948,
dedicated to presenting contemporary art to the public.
As a non-collecting museum, it strives to provide a forum for visual ...
. She also participated in PERFORMA 09 and collaborated with friend Clifford Owens
Clifford Owens is an African-American mixed media and performance artist, writer and curator. Owens was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1971 and spent his early life in Baltimore. Owens is known for his works which center on the body and often i ...
in his solo exhibition at PS1/ MoMA in New York.
Art critic Roberta Smith
Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position.
Early life
Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Smith studied a ...
of the ''New York Times'' wrote in 2008 of Woolfalk's "Ethnography of No Place," that she developed with anthropologist and filmmaker Rachel Lears, “a little tour de force of performance, animation, born-again Pattern and Decoration
Pattern and Decoration was a United States art movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The movement has sometimes been referred to as "P&D"
or as The New Decorativeness. The movement was championed by the gallery owner Holly Solomon. The ...
, soft sculpture and anthropological satire.”
In the ''New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'', art critic Holland Cotter
Holland Cotter is an art critic with ''The New York Times''. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Life and work
Cotter was born in Connecticut and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College in 1970, wh ...
wrote of Woolfalk's Empathics in her piece "Chimera," at Third Streaming Gallery in 2013, "These sculptural figures, with their blossom heads, are fantastic but, as with all fundamentally spiritual art, a complex moral thread runs through the fantasy."
In an Art Talk with ''AMMO Magazine'', Woolfalk said, "I create fictional worlds that are as immersive and full-scale as possible. I take elements from the real world and fold them into fantasy so that they are semi-recognizable to my viewers. My favorite part of building these places is when they start to almost make themselves. It gets really exciting when the logic of a project has become so clear that he project tells me what should happen next in the story."
Curator Lowery Stokes Sims
Lowery Stokes Sims (born 1949) is an American art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art known for her expertise in the work of African, African American, Latinx, Native and Asian American artists such as Wifredo Lam, Fritz Scholder, ...
wrote in a Real Art Ways
Real Art Ways is a non-profit art space established in 1975. Located at 56 Arbor Street in the Parkville neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, Real Art Ways exhibits visual art, houses an independent cinema and presents live music, theater, and ...
catalogue in 2013 that "Woolfalk is single-handedly guiding us back to the original promise of modern art. Suprematism
Suprematism (russian: Супремати́зм) is an early twentieth-century art movement focused on the fundamentals of geometry (circles, squares, rectangles), painted in a limited range of colors. The term ''suprematism'' refers to an abstra ...
and Constructivism
Constructivism may refer to:
Art and architecture
* Constructivism (art), an early 20th-century artistic movement that extols art as a practice for social purposes
* Constructivist architecture, an architectural movement in Russia in the 1920s a ...
in Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
, De Stijl
''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body ...
in the Netherlands
)
, anthem = ( en, "William of Nassau")
, image_map =
, map_caption =
, subdivision_type = Sovereign state
, subdivision_name = Kingdom of the Netherlands
, established_title = Before independence
, established_date = Spanish Netherl ...
introduced formal devices such the elimination or blunting of figural reference, the use of simple geometric shapes and primary colors in the belief that these encourage a transnational, un-xenophobic perspective that would lead us to open-minded future. Therefore we underestimate Saya Woolfalk at our peril, because it is conviction such as hers that can move cultures and shift the meta-narrative."
She has received awards including a Fulbright for research in Maranhão
Maranhão () is a state in Brazil. Located in the country's Northeast Region, it has a population of about 7 million and an area of . Clockwise from north, it borders on the Atlantic Ocean for 2,243 km and the states of Piauí, Tocantins and ...
, São Paulo
São Paulo (, ; Portuguese for ' Saint Paul') is the most populous city in Brazil, and is the capital of the state of São Paulo, the most populous and wealthiest Brazilian state, located in the country's Southeast Region. Listed by the Ga ...
, and Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a ...
, Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
a Joan Mitchell Foundation
Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artis ...
MFA Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...
Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant in 2007 and has been an artist-in-residence at the Newark Museum
The Newark Museum of Art (formerly known as the Newark Museum), in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States, is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, A ...
, University at Buffalo
The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 18 ...
, Yaddo
Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March  ...
, Sculpture Space and Dieu Donne Papermill. With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition, "The Institute of Empathy," ran at Real Art Ways
Real Art Ways is a non-profit art space established in 1975. Located at 56 Arbor Street in the Parkville neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, Real Art Ways exhibits visual art, houses an independent cinema and presents live music, theater, and ...
Hartford
Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since t ...
, CT from the fall of 2010 to the spring of 2011. Her first major solo exhibition at a North American museum opened at the Montclair Art Museum
The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is located in Montclair, New Jersey, United States, a few miles west of New York City. Since it opened in 1914 as the first museum in New Jersey that granted access to the public and the first dedicated solely to a ...
in October 2012.
Work
Woolfalk wanted to create something that allowed people to think about cross-cultural relationships and hybridization, however, she did not want to use her personal story and background to do so. Instead, she created the world of the Empathics within her work. The Empathics are a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. “Because I’m mixed race, I have this idea that to leave the conversation ambiguous is interesting,” she says. The Empathics were first on view in Woolfalks first solo show at the Montclair Art Museum
The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) is located in Montclair, New Jersey, United States, a few miles west of New York City. Since it opened in 1914 as the first museum in New Jersey that granted access to the public and the first dedicated solely to a ...
in the fall of 2012.
''No Place''
''No Place'' is a technicolor world depicted through dance, movement, video and sculptural objects. This work was developed out of Woolfalk's experiences studying performance and its intersection with spiritual practices in Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. She was with her husband, who was conducting anthropological research on descendants of escaped enslaved people, and Woolfalk describes finding herself comparing her working methods to scientific processes of her husband. In 2008, Woolfalk and anthropologist Rachel Lears gathered friends and asked them about their ideas of what a perfect utopia
A utopia ( ) typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book '' Utopia'', describing a fictional island societ ...
would be. They took those Ideas and intertwined them into what is now known as ''No Place.''
''ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space''
This work has been included in the shows ''Enter the Mandala: Cosmic Centers and Mental Maps of Himalayan Buddhism'' at the in 2014 and ''Disguise: Masks & Global African Art'' at the Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum (commonly known as SAM) is an art museum located in Seattle, Washington, United States. It operates three major facilities: its main museum in downtown Seattle; the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park on Cap ...
in 2015 and the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. She has cited sowei helmet masks produced by the Sande society
Sande, also known as zadεgi, bundu, bundo and bondo, is a women's initiation society in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast. The Sande society initiates girls into adulthood by rituals including female genital mutilation. It is ...
in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone,)]. officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered by Liberia to the southeast and Guinea surrounds the northern half of the nation. Covering a total area of , Sierr ...
as inspiration for this work because of how the female-centered community used these masks in masquerades and female initiation rituals.
Influences
She draws upon sources as far-ranging as Japanese anime and African masks and textiles used in ritual ceremonies.["Young Artists: Saya Woolfalk](_blank)
Timothy McCahill, ''W Magazine'' November 1, 2008 The garments she designs to be worn in her video works filmed in her installations are often fusions of her various influences, attesting to her views of cultural hybridity.
In an interview for HuffPost, Huffington Post, she described her attitude towards cultural hybridity: "Although cultures do have important political utility, the idea that cultures develop in vacuums is false. Cultures really build on each other. American culture is a serious hybrid—an agglomeration of all of the different immigrant groups and nationalities. history of European colonialism, slavery, and Native American history made our culture what it is today."[Artist Saya Woolfalk Is Challenging Ideas of Race and Cultural Boundaries](_blank)
Alanah Joseph, ''Huffington Post'', December 6, 2017
Woolfalk also based the construct of cultural hybridity off of her experience as a "binational" person. While growing up, she attended elementary school in Japan and learned about plants and their relationships to humans. From such a young age, she was taught that plants and humans are connected in many ways, which later contributed to the creation of The Empathics. Additionally, in college, Woolfalk encountered the Kaki Tree project, which involved the single persimmon tree that survived the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki. This tree allowed intercultural exchanges to be made using its saplings, while also displaying that through pain and suffering does new, improved world emerge. This experience affected Woolfalk so much that she stated, "The structure and drives of this project impacted how I wanted to conceive my future work."
Teaching and mentoring
In 2002, Woolfalk began teaching as a Teaching Artist for the nonprofit Publicolor
Publicolor is a not-for-profit organization based in New York City. It engages high-risk, low-income students ages 12–24 in a multi-year continuum of design-based programs to encourage academic achievement, college preparation, job readiness, a ...
in New York City. She then began teaching at Architreasures and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...
the following year. In 2006, Woolfalk became a thesis advisor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design
The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) is a private college specializing in the visual arts and located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. MCAD currently enrolls approximately 800 students. MCAD is one of just a few major art schools to offer ...
, and then she worked as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts
The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...
in 2007 in New York City. Woolfalk was also a visiting artist at the University of Buffalo
The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 18 ...
in 2009 and the University of Hartford
The University of Hartford (UHart) is a private university in West Hartford, Connecticut. Its main campus extends into neighboring Hartford and Bloomfield. The university attracts students from 48 states and 43 countries. The university and it ...
in 2010, respectively. in 2012, she became a graduate advisor at the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA critic at Parsons School of Design along with being a visiting artist at Montclair State University
Montclair State University (MSU) is a public research university in Montclair, New Jersey, with parts of the campus extending into Little Falls. As of fall 2018, Montclair State was, by enrollment, the second largest public university in New ...
. She stayed a visiting artist at Montclair State University in 2013, along with becoming an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design, where she held the adjunct professor position until 2018.
Recognition
Woolfalk has been the recipient of the Joan Mitchell MFA fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) fellowship for cross-disciplinary and performance work, the Art Matters grant, the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant for performance art, and the Deutsche Bank
Deutsche Bank AG (), sometimes referred to simply as Deutsche, is a German multinational investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Frankfurt, Germany, and dual-listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the New York Sto ...
Fellowship Award. Woolfalk has also been an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Newark Museum of Art
The Newark Museum of Art (formerly known as the Newark Museum), in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, United States, is the state's largest museum. It holds major collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, A ...
, Dieu Donne Papermill in New York City, the Museum of Arts and Design
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), based in Manhattan, New York City, collects, displays, and interprets objects that document contemporary and historic innovation in craft, art, and design. In its exhibitions and educational programs, the mus ...
, the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, New York, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, and Headlands Center for the Arts
Headlands Center for the Arts hosts an internationally recognized artist-in-residence program, and interdisciplinary public programs. It is situated in a campus of artist-renovated military buildings in the Marin Headlands, in Marin County, Cali ...
in California.
Personal life
Woolfalk is the daughter of a Japanese mother and a biracial African-American and white father. Her upbringing puts her in a position to chart an expanded definition of cultural diversity
Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures, as opposed to monoculture, the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures, akin to cultural evolution. The term "cultural diversity" can also refer to having different c ...
. She currently lives in Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
, New York with her husband, the anthropologist Sean T. Mitchell and their daughter Aya. Woolfalk maintains an art studio in Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
.
References
External links
Official website
A Look into the Future with Saya Woolfalk, Interview by Nicole Caruth, Art21 Blog, August, 2009
Body, Mind, Culture: Woolfalk and Lears’s Ethnography of No Place by Rael Jero Salley, emisferica, New York University, volume 5.2, Fall 2008
Saya Woolfalk by Timothy McCahill, ''W Magazine,'' November 2008
Ambiguity, Myth, and Saya Woolfalk’s No Place by Lee Ann Norman, Chicago Art Magazine, Feb 10, 2010
* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20130305055752/http://www.artslant.com/ny/artists/rackroom Interview with Saya Woolfalk, by Lee Ann Norman, ArtSlant, 2013
"Artist Saya Woolfalk: ChimaTEK: Virtual Chimeric Space" by the Seattle Art Museum
"If You Loved Black Panther, You Will Love Lessons from the Institute of Empathy", Charles Mudede, ''The Stranger'', June 20, 2018
"What World Do You Want to Live In?", ''TEDxKCWomen'', February 1, 2019
{{DEFAULTSORT:Woolfalk, Saya
1979 births
Living people
American artists of Japanese descent
American contemporary artists
People from Scarsdale, New York
School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni
Brown University alumni
Feminist artists
American conceptual artists
Women conceptual artists
American multimedia artists
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumni
21st-century American women artists
21st-century African-American women
21st-century African-American artists
20th-century African-American people
20th-century African-American women