Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, murals, drawing, performance, video
Website: wofflehouse.com
Jenifer K. Wofford was born in San Francisco, California, and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur before her family returned to California when she was a teenager. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute — where she studied with Carlos Villa, whose Worlds In Collision project was a significant influence on her development — and her MFA from UC Berkeley. She lives and works in San Francisco. She is represented by Silverlens Gallery in Manila and New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA (Bay Area Walls commission), the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum, and the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection, among others.
She is one-third of Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., a Filipina-American artist trio she co-founded with Reanne Estrada and Eliza Barrios, whose works address hybridity, identity, and global culture through performance, video, and installation. She teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs at the University of San Francisco, and has also taught at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Mills College, SFAI, CCA, and San Francisco State University.
Her awards include the 2025 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award, the 2023 YBCA 100 honoree distinction, the 2022–24 Lucas Arts Residency Program Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, the 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Murphy Fellowship, and grants from Art Matters, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has been artist-in-residence at Liguria Study Center in Italy and KinoKino in Norway. She was also curator of Galleon Trade, an international art exchange program among California, Mexico, and the Philippines.
Wofford works in painting, murals, drawing, video, and performance, with a practice that explores hybridity, authenticity, and global culture — often from a humorous, ironic, and self-aware perspective. Her paintings and murals are highly stylized, richly colorful, and visually complex, drawing on comic book, graphic novel, and illustrated book traditions alongside art history, pop culture, and Filipino visual heritage. Her subjects include Filipina American history and heroes — most notably her SFMOMA mural VMD (2024), honoring Victoria Manalo Draves, the first Asian American Olympic gold medalist — as well as the experiences of diaspora, caregiving, labor, and cultural translation. Her project Klub Rupturre!! centered on the Bay Area’s experience of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake as a site of cultural rupture and community formation. Three substantial public art commissions are currently in development in California.
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