2024
acrylic on wall
Commissioned for SFMOMA’s ‘Bay Area Walls’ series by curator Tanya Zimbardo.

Diving into history at the London 1948 Summer Olympic Games, Victoria “Vicki” Manalo Draves (1924–2010) became the first Asian American gold medalist. Jenifer K Wofford pictures Draves suspended in a pike in a vast space of gradient color, flanked by two other moments in the dive sequence. Wofford describes imagining a “soft inward focus with the mannered tension in Draves’s position—both completely on display and totally inside herself.”

The SFMOMA commission and Wofford’s larger Draves project engage the athlete in a manner more abstract than narrative, exploring the “tensions of surface and submersion in the dreamlike world of her diving practice.”

-adapted from Zimbardo’s museum wall text