NEW YORK, NY.- 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.
First Quarter: Court
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. A magic number of seven women stand linked together, each with one hand on the shoulder of the teammate in front and the other arm tucked demurely behind her back. The first in line holds the ball. All look straight out at us. Wofford has made a few changes to the photograph. The girls have grown into women, and their gaze has hardened into defiance. And the man who stood behind them, presumably their coach, a Filipino in Western dress and a tie, is gone. Wofford redresses the team, too.
The women wear knee socks and Filipiniana, the traditional dress, with square necklines and sleeves of sheer pia, a translucent cloth woven from pineapple fiber. Behind them is a wallpaper of banig, or woven mat. The clothes come from two colonial sources. One is the Tipos del Pas, or “Types of the Country,” the miniature watercolors that the Filipino painter Justiniano Asuncin made in the 1840s, under Spanish rule, to taxonomize the islands’ inhabitants. Wofford works from one titled La Yndia del Campo Tendedora, depicting a native Filipina field tender, or farmer. The other source is the photographs in James A. LeRoy’s Philippine Life in Town and Country, a 1905 account of Filipino society under the Americans. Wofford takes a laborer’s dress from the catalogue and makes it a team uniform. Her upbringing, moving between Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia, and the San Francisco Bay Area, has given her an observational gaze, and the women return the look.
Second Quarter: Skirmish
After its introduction by the Americans, Filipinos fell hard for basketball, but mostly for the men’s game. “Not that any nation celebrates women’s athletics equally, to be clear,” Wofford notes. Empress II (Skirmish) takes its form directly from a video still of a WNBA game in June 2026, between the Phoenix Mercury and the Indiana Fever. In a scramble for a loose ball, the Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas pushed a fist into the throat of the Fever’s Caitlin Clark, a violent play that earned Thomas a one-game suspension. A newscaster for Arizona’s Family, a Phoenix local news station, summarized the attack as “a feisty if not ugly couple of days in Indiana.”
“Ugly” and “feisty” are words often aimed at women who play hard, handed out according to how attractive the male gaze finds them. In Wofford’s hands, ugly becomes a refusal of decorum. The players in Empress won’t be good sports, and many of them refuse us the face.
Now they’re diwata, spiritual protectresses, leaping and contorting in poses lifted from art history. Their bodies twist in the figura serpentinata, the “serpentine figure,” a spiraling pose prominent in Renaissance painting and sculpture, from Michelangelo’s Victory (c. 1532-34) to Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1545). Its great ancient model is Laocon and His Sons (c. 200 BCE), the Hellenistic marble of a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in the coils of sea serpents. In Wofford’s version, it is Laon (a Visayan creator goddess) and her squad, if you will. The figures collide in a frenzy without losing an athlete’s precision.
Basketball suits painting. The scoring never stops, and Wofford’s canvases share that high frequency. The court is compact, ten bodies in a tight box. Similarly, Wofford’s compositions and exhibition space are close and confrontational. Players wear no helmets and play a few feet from the crowd, so every emotion shows.
Third Quarter: Lusutan
Empress III (Lusutan) depicts lusutan, a playful penalty ritual in Philippine basketball in which the losing team or player crawls between the legs of the winners. Working from found photographs of contemporary lusutan, Wofford paints the women from the waist down, all muscular calves and arms, as a loser crawls through. Nothing in their stance looks lighthearted, though. Winning and losing are both hard-won.
The trad-wife has an older cousin, the mail-order bride, a figure Wofford has subverted and embodied, literally, in her earlier work. Wofford is one-third of the Filipina American artist trio Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., whose campy videos and performances turn the stereotype inside out, and whose acronym spells mob, as in an organized crime outfit. Wofford’s paintings lean on the utility and unity of teams, and so does her practice. “Community and camaraderie are integral to my practice,” she has written. “There has to be connection to, and laughter with, others.” The line runs from the artist collective to the team sport to the barangay, or neighborhood, where you need to work together to put the ball in the basket when the odds include colonialism, corruption, and weather.
National Geographic took the Filipino obsession with the game seriously enough to give it a three-part series. In Pinoy Hoops (2013), the American writer Rafe Bartholomew, author of Pacific Rims, goes “from back alley courts to DIY hoops,” visiting “the communities that are so dedicated to the game that they build their own courts from scratch.” Lo-fi footage of the first episode lives on YouTube, posted by the user pinaysportsfan7950. In it, Bartholomew visits Caloocan City, in Metro Manila, and climbs to the roof of a 1950s building that had been a hotel, a derby, a cabaret, a karaoke club, a disco, and finally a gay bar called the Caribbean. After a fire in 2005, the burned-out building became a tenement for the employees who had lost their jobs. On its roof, the residents planted vegetables, flew kites, and kept a full-size basketball court. “Almost like a mini Colosseum,” says DJ Swift, the Filipino who got the film crew through the gates. “It’s like their own city of gods.” The game starts, with Bartholomew playing. “More than just a friendly game, it quickly turns into a battle to the finish,” he says. “And to put it lightly, they’re killing us.”
Fourth Quarter: Dream
But Wofford’s drawings are quieter. In them, the delicately rendered women leap, dribble, and dunk balletically. They float in gradient space that fades slowly from ochre to peach. Half of basketball happens on the ground, and the swagger that comes with it has long spilled off the court into fashion, music, and sneakers. However, Wofford’s drawings keep the game airborne and drifting.
The hazy sunset palette recalls her 2025 series You Dreamed of Empires, which imagines the sun setting over the courts of Morro Bay, on California’s central coast, the site of the first Filipino landing in the Americas, by crew members on a Spanish galleon in 1587. On a visit, Wofford noticed the town’s large basketball court and decided that it, like the ancestral ballcourts of Mesoamerica, was “evidence of the advanced cultural values of Filipinos.” The myth runs through her Battlefields paintings, abstractions based loosely on the schema of a basketball court, which she has extended into a fictional landscape where courts are “the invention and dominion of non-Western peoples.” It was while researching You Dreamed of Empires that she learned how girls’ basketball came to the Philippines and was taken away. In Empress, Wofford is determined to give the court back.
Wofford usually favors bright color, controlled chaos for the eye, but in Empress the palette is subdued. Tonal yellows, the soft black sheen of the women’s hair, the cream of their Filipiniana, the golden tan of their skin, the burnt orange of the ball. There is dignity and quiet in it, despite all the energy. She works with levity, and her crisp, direct images are easy to step into. Under them are serious questions about empire, gender, and who gets to play.
Words by Katey Acquaro
