Fall-Winter 2026 Featured Artist: Saya Woolfalk

Saya Woolfalk

I love speculative fiction as a vehicle for imaging future possibilities. As a creative mode, speculative story-making is a fantastic way to think critically and inclusively about our current bodily entanglements—the complexity of our physical relationships—while opening ourselves to new ways of living. As the artist Hito Steyerl notes, “The future starts anew at any moment, this moment is always in the present, this moment is always now.” Thinking the future creatively helps us define who we are and, more importantly, who we can become in relation to the ongoing flows of political uncertainty, climate change, technological advances, and global capitalism.

So imagine how excited I was to discover the work of Saya Woolfalk! An artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions. As the introduction to her TED Talk notes, Woolfalk “follows the tradition of great science fiction writers by telling stories that help us make the incomprehensible, or yet to be considered — comprehensible and considered. A form of future-forward imagining, Woolfalk’s work paints a picture of a world you might want to live in,” a world that embraces the fluid nature of identity and cultural hybridity.

My hope is that the worlds we build, the things that we imagine, give us access to openness, to empathy. . . so that we might be able to imagine a new world.

Above: Star Composition (2012)

For Woolfalk, building worlds to imagine better futures necessarily involves hybridization and collaboration. (Woolfalk’s artistic process is almost always in collaboration with others.) Her art tells the story, the story informs her art. For over twenty years, Woolfalk has woven her art into a possible future. Featured heavily are “The Empathics,” a fictional race of women whose story runs throughout Woolfalk’s art projects. Their name reflects the hope that future societies will develop stronger empathy for one another. In the Empathic world, technology is coeval to the genetic and social interdependence of plant life with humans. Through this techno-genetic perspective, museum or gallery visitors engage in an alternative mode of being, one in which the Empathics, as a lived-in community, invite us to make central the emotions of compassion, empathy, and love (Crow Museum).

*ChimaTEK: Hybridization Machine* (2013)

ChimaTek is the corporation established by The Empathics to market their interspecies hybridization around the world. They also created the non-profit Institute of Empathy. To learn more about Woolfalk’s fabulous world, I recommend watching her TEDTalk, or reading Hyperallergic’s “Saya Woolfalk Toys With Future Worlds,” or this review in 4Columns.