Performance Artist – Jennifer K Wofford

Jennifer K Wofford

Filipina-American Artist- Performance Art, Visual Arts, Installation, Philippine diaspora, Community art

Happily, I have no quick, one-word answer to the “what kind of art do you make” question: the questions that provoke my projects necessitate varied approaches, from visual and performance strategies to teaching and curatorial work. My work often plays with notions of difference, hybridity, liminality and authenticity. It’s often governed by the creative slapstick that occurs when aesthetic values blunder into cultural frictions and global inequities. I do what I can to make work that is absurd, irreverent, imaginative, honest and political, employing as many strategies as seem appropriate.

Most of my creative logic is governed by a global positionality that’s the result of a mixed Filipino/American family, a Third-Culture childhood in Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Malaysia; an adulthood in diverse California; and a lifetime of international and intercultural experience. It’s also shaped by years as an educator, working with a tremendous diversity of students and communities. For all of these reasons, I am committed to a practice that engages a multiplicity of voices often unheard or under-represented in the arts.

Collaboration and camaraderie are integral parts of my practice: my projects often involve friends and strangers in all manner of creatively weird situations. I do not particularly consider myself an artist in isolation: the most satisfying work I’ve made has involved exchange, sharing, joking, and cooperation. It makes things more relevant, and more fun, immediately.

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