Saya Woolfalk 2014 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellow

Since 2000, the Bank has partnered with NYFA to annually award an artist who works with paper  with a Deutsche Bank Fellowship.

The award helps artists who live in New York State expand upon or create new projects. In addition, the Bank purchases art works by selected fellows for the Deutsche Bank Collection. 

Fellows are selected on merit by a panel of experts invited each year by Deutsche Bank, and chosen from a short list of approximately 40 candidates. The list is previously compiled by panels of jurors invited by NYFA, who have usually spent days and weeks deciding from thousands of applicants applying within eight categories of artistic disciplines. The NYFA jurors are peers such as artists, professors, and other experts in the field who are not connected to a museum. Since the awards launched in 1985, NYFA has granted over USD 27 million across 15 artistic disciplines.

Saya Woolfalk, whose work is currently on view through March 17, 2015 as part of the Herland exhibition at 60 Wall Gallery, is known for her ongoing exploration of hybrid identities that reflect  personal histories, including her own African American, European, and Japanese cultural roots. Allusions to science fiction, feminist theory, mythology, anthropology, and fashion inform her colorful, invented worlds populated by colorful plants, animals and fantastical beings known as “Empathics.” Woolfalk uses performance, video, painting, sculpture, photography, and site-specific installations to render the complexities of this unique social order and its belief system of compassion. 

She was chosen for the Herland exhibit by fellow artist, Wangechi Mutu, who commented, “Walking into one of Saya's installations is like walking into a mysterious museum from some kind of parallel universe that's been taken over by a cult of curious knowledge seekers. Saya is from this very family of brilliant world makers.”