Profile: Saya Woolfalk

          In 2019, one could encounter Woolfalk’s work at a diverse number of venues across the United States – from the Seattle Art Museum, to 21c Hotel Bentonville, to World Trade Center’s Oculus. Woolfalk created an immersive installation at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center: creating a large-scale mural in-situ, outdoors on a building in Cincinnati, and collaborating with the cultural anthropologist Aimee Meredith Cox on dance performances that weaved through the city. The artist was also awarded the “Art in Resonance'' series of commissions for The Peninsula Hotels, beginning with a multimedia installation last fall in Paris, a first for the storied luxury hotel brand.  Each opportunity outside the established academic museum community prompts a new way to connect. As Woolfalk states, “I’m more interested in interaction with the viewer and the object, and what that will bring to their experience.” 
          In a recent Ted Talk public address, Woolfalkhas wagered the question: “What world do you want to live in?” Her answer has taken on elements of sculpture, painting, printmaking, performance and dance; all critiqued, filtered, represented and expressed through “eco-feminism, Afro-Futurism, or the spiritual traditions of Japan”. Woolfalkrattles off this sample list of socio-anthropological considerations that she imbues in her work, but maintains: “I don’t tend to repeat or replicate ideas, my work to date has been super consistent.”  This practice of intent leads to work that combines a smooth formula of aesthetics, politics and institutional critique.

          Woolfalk’s vernacular avoids cynicism, which might be an expected catch-all to explain an artist who creates alternative worlds. Grounded, joyful, jubilant and generous: these are the words that Woolfalk says describe her practice. “I want people to walk into a space and feel it wants to hold them,” she says with a laugh. That warmth, the glow, the possibilities, the hope: with these qualifiers, her worlds – depictions of futuristic societies of integration and hybridity – could be utopias. These alternative realities are a vehicle to explore fraught identities, not just of the self but on a societal level, concerning claims of power and agency. “The foundation of the work comes from identity,” says Woolfalk, whether that means tackling questions of categorization, genre or even personal identity. 
          Woolfalk herself was born in Japan, to a Japanese mother and an African American and white American father. She describes finding herself surrounded by, “lots of different experiences I was having simultaneously”. When making things with her Japanese grandmother in her house in the mountainous prefecture of Gifu, Japan (where, she says, her identity as an artist first emerged); or when listening to stories about her paternal grandparents’ life in Harlem, Woolfalk’s own world is shaped by her family story. “The work is not about me, it’s intentionally not about me,” she says, although she acknowledges that this doesn’t mean the lessons life has taught “Saya the person” don't also inform “Saya the artist.” These two sides coexist, and pinning Woolfalk down as either woman or artist is challenging: “I’m difficult to do with that, you can't really do that with me,” she says.