Project Type: Wofford

You Dreamed of Empires

acrylic on canvas
2025

Continuing an abstraction series based on basketball court schema while expanding into representational renderings of these courts as the invention and dominion of non-Western peoples. Morro Bay, California becomes the historic site of the first Filipino basketball court of the Americas at the sunset of empire.

The series title refers, but is not directly related, to the darkly funny Álvaro Enrigue book of the same name. Exhibited at Silverlens NY in ‘Galleon Trade,’ an exhibition on the intertwined histories of the Philippines, Latin America, Spain and the United States.

Notes on Lifting

Ohana Center for Child and
Adolescent Behavioral Health
Montage Health
Monterey, CA
2025

Releasing the weight of a burden; transforming something as heavy and hard as rock into a state as light as a balloon.  Ohana Center provides young people and their families with mental health services and care.

Rupturre 25 (Warp Weft)

2025
temporary printed mural, printed matter, website art

Inspired by textiles and flora of the Asia Pacific region, this work is part of Wofford’s ongoing Rupturre series. It was created for the San Francisco Public Library’s annual Weaving Stories celebration of AANHPI (Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) heritage.

The artwork is on display at the Main Library as well as via SFPL-wide posters, event calendars, and the SFPL website during the month of May 2025.

VMD

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

Comfort Room

Installation with paintings
Coulter Art Gallery

Mise-en-scene in two parts (front stage, back stage) addressing grief, loss, and liminality. The term “Comfort Room” in the Philippines means “bathroom”: here, it’s instead meant to invoke spaces of solace and transition.

Exhibition for the Stanford Art Practice Program’s Holt Visiting Artist Residency, curated by Gabriel Harrison.