What if basketball had been invented by Filipinas, and they still ruled the court? That’s the premise of Empress, Jenifer K Wofford’s speculative origin myth for the game. In the intimate exhibition space, Wofford’s squad confronts you the moment you walk in. You are in their house, and amidst the skirmish. The women who live here are completely sovereign. Ruling, yet unruly.
Wofford’s paintings world-build around a 1910s photograph of a girls’ team from Apalit, Pampanga. American colonizers brought the sport to the Philippines in the early 1900s as a sport for girls in the public school system. Then conservative Catholic groups had it struck from the curriculum, fearing that young women in bloomers would pick up aggression, promiscuity, even lesbianism.
In Empress, it is the long horizontal canvas Empress I (court) that you meet first.