Museum of Arts and Design

The first retrospective of the artist’s two decades of world-building installations, the exhibition showcases Woolfalk’s ambitious fictional narrative of an imagined race of women known as “Empathics.” Woolfalk has created for the Empathics’ their own distinctive visual imagery, symbolism, and folklore, which reflect her investigations of African, African American, Japanese, European, and Brazilian art, craft, and storytelling. In this parable told through garment-based sculptures, video, paintings, works on paper, and performances, cultures mix, clash, and are ultimately transformed through shared understanding.