Saya Woolfalk
2009 Swing Space Resident, 77 Water Street
Born in 1979 in Gifu, Japan, Saya Woolfalk lives and works in New York City. Woolfalk holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from Brown University, and has completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at PS1/Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Momenta Art. Woolfalk received an ArtMatters grant for research in Japan, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for performance, a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Brazil, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Fellowship.
Woolfalk has participated in numerous residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. With support from Franklin Furnace, Harvestworks, and The Puffin Foundation she developed a piece with University of Buffalo Art Gallery, A Ritual of the Empathics, that will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem for Performa09.
During her Swing Space tenure, Saya will continue her work on No Place: A Ritual of the Empathics, which is the artist’s investigation into a fictional future called No Place. Last summer, Woolfalk introduced us to the part plant part human people of No Place in a multi media video installation developed as an Artist in Residence at Studio Museum.
With A Ritual of the Empathics, Woolfalk expands the narrative of No Place to include a group of women in the present called the Empathics. The Empathics believe No Place is a future worth inhabiting and through a variety of collaborative processes they create sets, workshops, and a performance to try and conjure a utopian No Place into 2009.
