Artist talk: Laurena Finéus & Saya Woolfalk

​Join us for an artist talk with Laurena Finéus and Saya Woolfalk, celebrating Finéus’s debut solo exhibition, Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kòlè.

​The artists will come together for a special conversation exploring Finéus’s practice and the inspiration behind her new body of work.

Laurena Finéus earned an MFA from Columbia University (2024), and a BFA from the University of Ottawa, Canada (2020). Her work is in the public collections of Google, Canada Council Art Bank and the City of Ottawa. She was the recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Fund award (2023), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (2022-23), the Ottawa Arts Council IBPOC Emerging Artist Award (2022), the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual art scholarship (2020), and the Ineke Harmina Standish Memorial award (2019). In 2025, Fineus’ work was featured in The Shed’s Open Call: Portals.

​Saya Woolfalk (Japan, 1979) is a New York based artist who uses science fiction and fantasy to re-imagine the world in multiple dimensions.  With the multi year projects No Place, The Empathics, and ChimaTEK, Woolfalk has created the world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of these women's lives, and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity.