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 as Class Speaker with a BA with Honors from the
University of Washington in Seattle in Spring 2025 and is currently an MFA candidate in
Painting and Drawing at Pratt Institute. Wolf is a visual artist, arts writer, and arts educator.
Recent exhibition venues include the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, Common
Objects, and Stuben Gallery.
From 2023-2024, Wolf worked with the Seattle Art Museum’s Education team in
Interpretation. Wolf’s writing can be found in Dozer Magazine as well as The Black
Embodiments Studio, where, from 2024-2025, Wolf was invited to and participated in an
intensive arts writing incubator for Black Arts writing in Seattle, Washington. Wolf’s
ethnographic research on Black Family Archives has been presented in the form of two
paintings, a research paper, and a talk at a research symposium on “Black Sense” at the Henry
Art Gallery in 2023. Wolf’s artworks have also been featured in publications such as The
Basement, the Black Student Journal, and The Weasel.
Selected awards include the Mary Gates Research Scholarship for Wolf’s archival
research and the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Endowment for Wolf’s painting
practice. Wolf was also selected to be the class speaker for the 2025 graduating Bachelor of Fine
Arts students at the University of Washington.
