Wolf the Storyteller
Raised in an era of rapidly evolving social technology, collaborative storytelling both cruelly and lovingly rooted itself in my life in anonymous chatrooms, multiplayer video games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Burdened and empowered by these experiences, I obsessively investigate moral perfectionism in the wake of the internet's hypervisibility. My works invoke the childhood power of "playing pretend" to explore difficult sociological dilemmas. I seek to shepherd the shameful conversations that happen in the dead of night in hushed tones to the luminosity of the canvas.
I study the lines between character and caricature and ask what happens when we put the weight of a people on a fictionalized body. Treating my paintings like a tabletop role-playing game, I beg the viewer to become a collaborator in unearthing insights into research questions surrounding racial construction and deconstruction, the performance of "goodness", digital voyeurism, and other sins we're too afraid to verbalize.
Kyra "Wolf" Wolfenbarger (b. 2003) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, Wolf graduated with a BA with Honors from the University of Washington in Spring 2025. Wolf is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting and Drawing at Pratt Institute. Emerging from a childhood dense with creative writing and roleplaying games, Wolf finds passion in collaborative storytelling as a viable method of unearthing interior truths. This has emerged through collaborations with soundscape artists such as Jai Lasker and poets such as James Weiners.
Wolf is a nerd who, during free time, writes and creates art for video games and video game content, reads, and haunts local coffee shops. Wolf's exhibition and symposium venues include the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and the Henry Art Gallery. Selected awards include the Mary Gates Research Scholarship for Wolf's ethnographic research in Black family archives through visual art, the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Endowment for Wolf's art academic pursuits, and Class Speaker for the 2025 graduating BA in Art students.
