Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
b. 1979 Gifu City, Japan
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Inspired by her Japanese, African American, and European family background Saya Woolfalk creates paintings, collages, prints, sculpture, video, and performances. Alluding to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, and Eastern religion, her works reveal the ongoing elaborate fiction of the Empathics, a community of female plant-human hybrids who possess extraordinary abilities to understand the feelings, desires, and motivations of others.
During the past two decades, Woolfalk has presented multimedia works, immersive installations, and performances in solo and group shows at museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Her many public commissions include The Coretta Scott King Peace and Meditation Garden, at the King Center in Atlanta.
Works by the artist are in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum; the Hunter Museum of American Art; AKG Buffalo Art Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Chrysler Museum of Art; the Mead Museum of Art; the Everson Museum of Art; the Newark Museum of Art; the Weatherspoon Art Museum; and many other institutions.
Among Woolfalk’s numerous honors and awards are the Fulbright grant for study in Brazil; residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Pilchuck Glass School; the Newark Museum of Art; the Toledo Museum of Art; and the 2023 Anonymous Was a Woman award.
Saya Woolfalk earned her B.A. in visual art and economics from Brown University in 2001 and her MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004.
Saya Woolfalk is represented by Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Photo: LaMont Hamilton