Silverlens in New York is presenting Empress, an exhibition by Jenifer K Wofford, on view from 5 November to 19 December 2026. The show asks a single counterfactual question: what if basketball had been invented by Filipinas, and they still ruled the court? An essay by Katey Acquaro accompanies the paintings.

The first quarter, Court, builds on a photograph from the 1910s of a girls' team from Apalit, Pampanga. American colonisers brought basketball to the Philippines in the early 1900s as a sport for girls in the public school system, before Catholic groups had it struck from the curriculum, fearing bloomers would teach girls aggression and promiscuity. In the long canvas Empress I, seven women stand linked together, the first holding the ball, their gaze hardened into defiance; the coach who stood behind them in the photograph is gone. They wear Filipiniana dress with sheer piña sleeves against a wallpaper of banig, woven mat.

The second quarter, Skirmish, takes its form from a video still of a WNBA game in June 2026, when the Phoenix Mercury's Alyssa Thomas pushed a fist into the throat of the Indiana Fever's Caitlin Clark, earning a one-game suspension. Wofford notes how words like ugly and feisty are aimed at women who play hard. In her hands the players become diwata, spiritual protectresses, twisting in the figura serpentinata of Renaissance painting, with Laon, a Visayan creator goddess, leading the squad.

The third quarter, Lusutan, pictures the penalty ritual in Philippine basketball in which the losing side crawls between the legs of the winners, while the final quarter, Dream, turns quieter, with drawings of women leaping and dunking in gradient space. The palette recalls Wofford's 2025 series You Dreamed of Empires, set at Morro Bay, the site of the first Filipino landing in the Americas in 1587. Wofford, a San Francisco artist and educator, is one-third of the trio Mail Order Brides, a 2025 Artadia awardee and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient.