Jenifer K Wofford
Happily, I have no quick, one-word answer to the "what kind of art do you make" question: it's sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, photo, video, performance, teaching, and curating. The questions that provoke my projects necessitate varied approaches. They frequently address intercultural exchange and discourse, often playing with notions of culture, difference, liminality or authenticity. The friction in my work comes from the mish-mash visual poetics of travel, temporality, literature and slapstick rubbing up against political realities and global inequities. I make work that is honest, political, weird, interior, irreverent and imaginative, employing as many strategies as seem appropriate.
Of all my various odd jobs, working in arts education for thirteen years refined my goals as an artist: Teaching urban youth clarified why art still matters: it sharpened my ability to share contemporary art and ideas, and to make this vital to students for whom these often seemed elusive and elitist. The strategies I've chosen as an artist are absolutely informed by what I've learned from my students. In getting reacquainted with the art and academic elite in recent years, I’ve been alternately shocked and inspired by the degrees of indifference, resistance, rhetoric and action being taken vis-à-vis the ever-thorny questions of diversity and representation. All of these experiences have only clarified my commitments to a multiplicitous practice that engages voices often unheard or under-represented in the arts.
Collaboration and camaraderie are integral parts of my practice: recent projects have involved friends and strangers in all manner of creatively weird situations. And I've made art with Mail Order Brides/M.O.B. for over a decade now: we are still working together long after many marriages and metal bands have broken up, because our collaborative agenda comes out of friendship and a willingness to play. I do not particularly consider myself an artist in isolation: the most satisfying work I've participated in has involved exchange, sharing, joking, and cooperation. It makes things more relevant, and more fun, immediately.