Fig. 1. Empathics dancing in the "Star Compulsion" formation Saya Woolfalk’s installations, performances, and multimedia work imagine the future in the terms of Afrofuturism, extending a tradition that includes “the music of Sun Ra and George Clinton and science-fiction novels by Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler” (Johnson). Jonathan Walz, Curator of American Art at the Sheldon Museum, said that her art encourages a dynamics of empathy, which is “needed now more than ever.”

Artist Saya Woolfalk’s works in paint, soft sculpture, installation, and video playfully and powerfully re-imagine the possibilities of being human. Using color, sculptural costumes, performance, and storytelling, the New York artist simultaneously envisions a future utopia and critiques the shortcomings of contemporary society. Woolfalk will discuss three recent, inter-related bodies of work—No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK—in a Humanities on the Edge lecture at the She

Saya Woolfalk, ChimaTEK Beta Launch, 2014, installation view, (Photo credit: ArtMag 85) On March 3, the Humanities on the Edge lecture series will welcome visual artist Saya Woolfalk to speak about her work. Woolfalk will be the series’ 23rd speaker—and its first visual artist. Woolfalk’s art provides a unique perspective on HotE’s theme for this year, “Posthuman Futures.” In her artist statement, Woolfalk writes: “My work considers the idea that symbolic and ideological syst

Has not institutionalized advertising replaced former modes of communication, including art? (Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World) On city streets, history is a bus schedule or a billboard. When a city responds to the mystification and confining repetition of what the French call metro-boulot-dodo or subway-work-sleep life, it builds monuments, memorials, and parks. The visual rhetoric of these projects is often tame and in line with the views of urban developer

“Anal obscenity, pushed to such a point that the most representative apes even got rid of their tails (which hide the anus from other animals), completely disappeared from the fact of human evolution. The human anus secluded itself deep within flesh, in the crack of the buttocks, and it forms now a projection only in squatting and excretion. All the potential for blossoming, all the possibilities for the liberation of energy, now under normal circumstances found the way open

​​ I’ll admit to being late to the Mad Men party. While the series debuted in 2007, I am still slogging through season 6 on Netflix—emphasis on slogging. From Don Draper’s revolving-door series of sexual conquests to his clichéd childhood trauma (inflicted by the classic Bad Mother, soothed by the Hooker with a Heart of Gold in his inaugural sexual experience), the general thrust of the plotline has gotten old fast. (He’s tortured! He uses women! We get it already!) Mark Grei

A watershed is a geographic feature that divides water into different systems. A watershed also represents the tributaries and gathering ground for a central body of water. As graduate students at the University of Nebraska, we acknowledge the significance of watersheds to the agricultural industry as well as the ecology of the Great Plains region. However and perhaps most popularly, a watershed is known to be a crucial event or occurrence recognized as causing a turning poin