Saya Woolfalk
Institute of Empathy

Hear the Artist:
What is the Institute of Empathy?	[Download an audio clip of Saya Woolfalk]
What does Utopia mean to you?	[Download an audio clip of Saya Woolfalk]
How did you do research for this?	[Download an audio clip of Saya Woolfalk]
On light	[Download an audio clip of Saya Woolfalk]
A dancer's dream	[Download an audio clip of Saya Woolfalk]

Artist Statement:

Drawing material from various realms of the visual—pop-culture, ritual, street-spectacle—I use art as a laboratory to catalogue and critique our socio-visual landscape. Combining performance, sculpture, painting, and video, my installations investigate and playfully re-imagine the representational systems that hierarchically shape our lives. My art is an experimental ground where I create alternative bodies, environments, and consciousnesses.
 
A black, white, and Japanese woman, my work is inspired by ethnographic, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. I spent two years going back and forth between Brazil and the United States and traveled to Japan in the fall of 2008. All three countries have had an enormous influence on my practice.
 
My sketches are a notational system; from them, I make paintings that recombine texts, images, and objects. From the two-dimensional I move to the three-dimensional and create landscapes. Through performance and video I activate those landscapes and produce narrative.

[watch a video of some of Saya Woolfalk's work]

Dance Performance

At Creative Cocktail Hour on Thursday, March 17, 2011 between 6-8 PM Saya Woolfalk will present a dance performance as part of her exhibition. Dance collaboration performed and created by Jessica Kilpatrick with Jillian Greenberg and Ana Masiero of the Hartt School Dance Division, University of Hartford.

Real Art Ways visitors will be able to see these upcoming open dance rehearsals in the galleries:
Sunday, March 13, 2011 | 2-5 PM

About the Artist:

Saya Woolfalk is a New York artist who re-imagines the world in multiple dimensions (sculpture, installation, and painting to performance and video). In 2007-2008 she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, before that she completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio, holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Brown University.

She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Momenta Art; Performa09; as well as other national and international venues. She received an Art Matters grant to Japan and a NYFA grant (2007), a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil (2005), a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant (2004), was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and Sculpture Space. With funding from the NEA, her solo exhibition The Institute of Empathy, will open at Real Art Ways in the fall of 2010.

This exhibition was made possible with the support of our members, and:

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Greater Hartford Arts Council's United Arts Campaign
Travelers
Hartford Foundation for Public Giving
Sandy and Howard Fromson
The Wallace Foundation
Lincoln Financial Group
Maximilian E. & Marion O. Hoffman Foundation
The Nimoy Foundation

• Interview with Saya Woolfalk: Art21
• artist's website