Saya Woolfalk
Biography
Saya Woolfalk is an Asian- and African-American performance artist based in New York. She also travelled to Japan for the study of performance and craft traditions under an Art Matters Grant in 2007. Also in 2007, Woolfalk received an NYFA Fellowship in performance art and became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The same year, Woolfalk first exhibited No Place at the Zg Gallery in Chicago, Illinois. No Place has become probably her best-known piece. Performed again at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery in 2009, No Place represents a kind of slippage between the language that codifies daily life and the inability to entirely capture the subject. Her most recent performance, entitled The Ritual of the Empathics, is a piece in which women try to conjure No Place into the present through a series of rituals. Woolfalk intends ultimately to show three temporalities: the present, the future, and the future of the future.
