Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe

n Spring 2025, the Museum of Arts and Design will present Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, a parable exploring how cultures mix, clash, and ultimately transform through shared understanding. On view from April 12 through September 7, 2025, this is the multimedia artist’s first retrospective and her first major museum exhibition in New York City, bringing together two decades of site-specific installations composed of garment-based sculptures, video, paintings, works on paper, and performance.

Woolfalk’s practice represents one of the earliest and most influential examples of “world-building” in contemporary art. Her ambitious fictional narrative centers on an imagined race of women known as the Empathics, a storyline that weaves through her entire body of work. Their story unfolds through distinctive imagery, symbolism, and folklore that reflect Woolfalk’s deep engagement with African, African American, Japanese, European, and Brazilian art, craft, and storytelling.

“With its sumptuous handmade aesthetic, interdisciplinary approach, and probing examination of how craft shapes and reflects global cultures, Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe offers both a space for contemplation and a hopeful vision for navigating turbulent times together,” said curator Alexandra Schwartz, MAD’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design.

“Saya, an alumna of MAD’s Artist Studios program and previously featured in our 2022 exhibition Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, now returns for her first retrospective,” said Elissa Auther, MAD’s Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and William and Mildred Lasdon Chief Curator. “Like many artists who’ve had their first major museum exhibitions at MAD, Saya synthesizes diverse and unexpected genres, cultures, and materials to address society’s most urgent questions. In her Empathic Universe, she envelops us in fantastical new forms of creative expression while asking: What world do you want to live in?”

Multidisciplinary in scope, the exhibition is presented as a multi-part work of fiction, with each chapter representing one of Woolfalk’s major projects to date. The garments double as costumes, and the installations as stage sets for in-gallery dance performances choreographed and performed in collaboration with the Alvin Ailey/Fordham University BFA Dance Program. An original audio production—written and performed in collaboration with the Atlantic Theater Company/NYU Tisch School of the Arts BFA Acting Program—will also be included, and made available via Bloomberg Connects, the free arts and culture app.

Narrative Summary

Chapter 1: No Place (2006–08) and Winter Garden (2005)

Woolfalk first developed the Empathic Universe in two early projects: No Place and Winter Garden. No Place is an installation incorporating costume-based sculptures, performance, and film, drawing on travel narratives, science fiction, and anthropological discourse. The title references the word “utopia,” coined by Sir Thomas More from the Greek ou (no) and topos (place)—literally “no place.” The project reflects on anthropology and art’s utopian impulses to make “otherness” visible and knowable.

In Woolfalk’s narrative, the No Placeans’ ancestors were characters from Winter Garden, inspired by Egungun ceremonial dress and biracial “topsy-turvy” dolls from the American Civil War era. These characters inhabit a lush, imagined Winter Garden—a 17th-century European tradition of indoor gardens attached to palaces and filled with exotic plants from colonized regions. While visually exuberant, the project offers a critique of colonialism’s legacy.

Chapter 2: The Empathics (2009–13)

The narrative of the Empathic Universe crystallizes in this chapter. A group of humans discovers bones sent back in time by the No Placeans. The bones contain a fungus capable of altering human DNA, enabling the transformation into Empathics—hybrid plant-humans who believe in No Place as a future utopia, possess the ability to empathize with others, and maintain a biological kinship with nature.

This body of work includes diorama-inspired installations. Drawing on her childhood experiences at the American Museum of Natural History, Woolfalk critiques the colonialist impulse behind dioramas that put other cultures on display. The centerpiece, Utopian Conjuring Chamber, features four figures undergoing a vision ritual that transforms them into Empathics.

Chapter 3: ChimaTEK (2013–15)

In this phase, the Empathics establish ChimaTEK, a fictional tech company offering products that help users transcend racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism. Inspired by the mythological chimera—an impossible hybrid—Woolfalk explores themes of transformation, identity, and commercialization. The project includes installations, sculptures, videos, and works on paper, all unified by the Empathics’ signature rainbow-hued, patterned aesthetic.

Narrative videos like ChimaTEK Life Products parody infomercials, simultaneously presenting technology as a tool for empowerment and critiquing its commodification.

Chapter 4: ChimaCloud and Visionary Reality Outpost (2016–21)

Woolfalk introduces ChimaCloud, a digital archive of the identities relinquished by ChimaTEK users. Every interaction with ChimaCloud contributes to an alternative digital future. Inspired by the growing impact of online communities and social media, these works question how digital life shapes real-world relationships and politics.

Installations such as Expedition to the ChimaCloud and Visionary Reality Outpost immerse visitors in imagined technologies and speculative futures. Works like Landscape of Anticipation 2.0 and Floating World of the Cloud Quilt visualize these imagined environments.

Chapter 5: The Empathic Universe (2022–present)

Woolfalk’s latest works deepen her focus on landscape and spatial ideologies. Commissioned by major American museums, these large-scale installations combine glass, textiles, video, and augmented reality to propose decentralized, post-patriarchal landscapes. As Woolfalk explains, “I am working toward creating landscapes that decentralize and dislocate patriarchal Eurocentric ideologies—spaces that people can inhabit in real time and space.”

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated scholarly catalogue, Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, published in partnership with Hirmer Publishers. This first monograph on Woolfalk’s work is edited by Alexandra Schwartz and features essays by Naomi Beckwith, Lowery Stokes Sims, and Jasmine Wahi.

Exhibition Credits

Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and from the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support is provided by The Blue Rider Group at Morgan Stanley.

About the Artist

Saya Woolfalk creates artwork that reflects her multicultural heritage—African American, European American, and Japanese—and engages themes from science fiction, feminist theory, mythology, anthropology, Eastern religion, craft, and fashion. She imagines a utopian, empathic world through painting, sculpture, video, performance, multimedia installations, and public art.

Born in 1979 in Gifu City, Japan, and raised in the United States, Woolfalk earned her B.A. in Visual Art and Economics from Brown University (2001) and her M.F.A. in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2004). She received a Fulbright grant to study in Brazil and completed a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2007.

Her work has been exhibited at major institutions across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including solo exhibitions at the Newark Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the SCAD Museum of Art, and the Chrysler Museum, among others. Group exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

About the Museum of Arts and Design

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields, showcasing artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest levels of ingenuity and skill. Since its founding in 1956 by philanthropist Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated the transformative power of materials and making—from traditional craft to cutting-edge technologies.

MAD’s exhibitions emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, providing a global platform for innovation and a participatory space where visitors engage with creative processes firsthand.

For more information, visit madmuseum.org.