Saya Woolfalk (born 1979, Gifu City, Japan) is an American artist known for her multimedia exploration of hybridity, science, race and sex.
Woolfalk was born in Gifu City, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a mixed-race African American and Caucasian father.
[4] Woolfalk moved to New York in the 2006, to participate in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
[10] Art critic Roberta Smith 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, soft sculpture and anthropological satire.”[11] In the New York Times, art critic Holland Cotter 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".
[12] In an Art Talk with AMMO Magazine, Woolfalk said, "I create fictional worlds that are as immersive and full-scale as possible.
Suprematism and Constructivism in Russia, De Stijl in the Netherlands 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.
"[14] She has received awards including a Fulbright for research in Maranhão, São Paulo, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and from the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an Art Matters Grant in 2007.
[15] She has been an artist-in-residence at the Newark Museum,[16] University at Buffalo,[17] Yaddo,[18] Sculpture Space and Dieu Donne Papermill.
With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition, "The Institute of Empathy," ran at Real Art Ways Hartford, CT from the fall of 2010 to the spring of 2011.
With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.
[25] 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.
This tree allowed intercultural exchanges to be made using its saplings, while also displaying that through pain and suffering a 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".