Our Dallas Arts District location will be closed March 3 through April 5 in preparation for upcoming exhibitions.

statue near the museum entrance
Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas

Saya Woolfalk: Floating World of the Cloud Quilt

Saturday, March 8, 2025 - Sunday, September 7, 2025

Upcoming at The Crow Museum at UT Dallas

Over the span of twenty years, Woolfalk has undertaken the project of world-building in which a fictional race of women known as Empathics inhabit an Empathic Universe. These hybrid beings of Empathics have reconfigured and rearticulated the contours of their bodies by genetically fusing with plants. More aptly, the Empathics brought into existence changes in human biology. In the Empathic world, technology is coeval to the genetic and social interdependence of plant life with humans. Through this techno-genetic perspective, visitors engage in an alternative mode of being in which the Empathics, as a lived-in community, invite us to center the emotions of compassion, empathy, and love. 

For this immersive installation of Cloud Quilt, Woolfalk created a dynamic interplay of symbols and imagery by drawing on her vast analog and digital archives of past projects. As such, her practice is one of collage or of quilting. According to Woolfalk, “A quilt is an object of comfort, warmth, and protection, and it is also a space for dreaming. With this work, I took a number of historical elements from the Empathic Universe that resonate specifically with the Crow Museum’s collection, and quilted them together so the audience can experience what being immersed in that world feels like.” 

Woolfalk’s world emphasizes the concept of duration, both as process and as measured time. Since Woolfalk situates the Cloud Quilt installation as an infinity loop, visitors engage in continuous and complex interactions and responses with the Empaths in a never-ending time scale. Become conscious of the importance of empathy through this endless temporality of Cloud Quilt. 

Exhibition on view on the UT Dallas campus.

Image:
Floating World of the Cloud Quilt (Crow Variation), 2025  
Multimedia installation: three-channel wall video (color with sound), single-channel floor video (color with no sound), infinity loop  
Saya Woolfalk  
American, born Japan, 1979; lives and works in New York  
Sound by Dim Gurevich  
Assistant Creative Direction by Isabel Sakura  
Studio Assistants include Jade Freed and Mauve Martineau  
Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, L2025.5.1
Photography: Etienne Frossard