Saya Woolfalk

Saya Woolfalk’s figurative stuffed fabric sculptures combine the kind of marketing eye candy seen at FAO Schwartz intended to seduce kids with the adult eye candy of Victoria Secret’s sexily clad mannequins. The artist presents a world that is fantastical and highly exoticized yet alarmingly essentialist. A series of sexualized, interactive dioramas allow visual systems of display to play out the familiar codes of race, gender, and commodification – in such an absurd manner that the normative systems are broken down, allowing for both a critique and a re-envisioning of social and political hierarchies.

Saya Woolfalk received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island in 2001. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2004. She received a Fulbright grant and a Jerome Fellowship in 2005. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Heidi Cho Gallery, New York, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Il, and inclusion in Greater New York, PS1, New York.