Alum Saya Woolfalk’s Fantastical Worlds Take Over MAD in NYC

School of the Art Institute of Chicago alum Saya Woolfalk (MFA 2004) was featured in The New York Times for her first major retrospective Empathic Universe, now on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Woolfalk was born in Gifu City, Japan, and raised in New York by a Japanese mother and an African American-Czech father. Her multicultural upbringing—steeped in Japanese traditional crafts—shapes her speculative, textured, and multicolored utopias. The show spans vivid sculptural tableaus and narrative video on one floor, and a “hallucinatory environment” of deep blues, purples, reds, and greens on another, layered with suspended glass, kaleidoscopic wallpaper, and textile-adorned figures. On view through September 7.