Photo credit: Kija Lucas
Added Value, 2018
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
A 1500-square-foot installation functioning as a radical reorganization of knowledge using "low value" used books, for sale to the general public. Conceived and organized by Stephanie Syjuco, featuring Related Tactics, The Prelinger Library, the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, and commissioned by the Public Knowledge initiative at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The project raised $20,000 in two days to benefit education and community programs for the San Francisco Public Library. Photo: Jin Zhu.
Detail: Dodge and Burn (Visible Storage), 2019. Part of the solo exhibition "Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States" at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Sept. 6 - Dec. 29, 2019.
Detail: Block Out the Sun, 2019. Photographic intervention in the archives of the Missouri Historical Society. Thirty archival pigment prints, 8" x 10", mounted on aluminum and displayed in custom vitrine.
Stephanie Syjuco
Associate Professor of Sculpture
Co-Director, Undergraduate Program, Art Practice Department
Faculty oversight: Ceramics Labs and The Project Lab, Art Practice Department
Email: ssyjuco@berkeley.edu
Website: www.stephaniesyjuco.com
Instagram: @ssyjuco
Office: Bauer Wurster Hall 176
Office hours: Wednesdays 12-1pm or by appointment. Sign up here.
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century.
Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Walker Art Center, The 12th Havana Bienal, and The 2015 Asian Art Biennial (Taiwan), among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, California.
At Berkeley she has taught courses in sculpture, social practice, photography, Junior Seminar, Senior Projects/Professional Practices, Special Topics, and Graduate Studio/Seminars. She oversees the Sculpture area with Professor Brody Reiman, the Ceramics area, and the Project Lab, which houses the Library of Tactical Knowledge.
Campus affiliations: Center for Southeast Asia Studies, The Center for Race and Gender (CRG), The Hearst Museum.
Courses Taught
ART 14 Sculpture Foundations
ART 21 Digital Photography: Foundations
ART 100 Big Ideas: Collaborative Innovation
ART 130 Advanced Sculpture: Concept and Construction
ART 133 Advanced Sculpture: Meaning in Material
ART 136 Advanced Sculpture: Radical Wearables
ART 141 Temporal Structures: Video and Performance Art
ART 160 Special Topics: Advanced Interdisciplinary Projects
ART 160 Special Topics: Art + Archive
ART 163 Social Practice: Critical Site and Context
ART 184 Junior Seminar: Meaning and Making
ART 185 Senior Projects/Professional Practices
ANTHRO196/HUM295 Collaborative Research Seminar: Tres Hornos: Earthen Ovens and Foodways of the Southwest
ARCH 209/ ART 209 Borderwall Urbanism (Global Urban Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Studio)
ART 218 Graduate Seminar: Theory and Criticism
ART 294 Graduate Studio Critique
Selected Honors and Awards
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, 2021
Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Award, 2019
Guggenheim Fellowship Award, 2014
Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, 2009
Eureka Fund Fellowship Award, Fleishhacker Foundation, 2001
Selected public collections
The Asian Art Museum, San Francisco
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco
The Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Jose Museum of Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Walker Art Center
The Whitney Museum of American Art
Represented by:
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
Silverlens Galleries, Manila/New York
Recent Highlights
Stephanie Syjuco: White Balance/Color Cast, solo exhibition, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Sept. 18, 2022 - March 5, 2023
Undoing Time: Art and the Histories of Incarceration, BAMPFA, Sept. 3–Dec. 18, 2022
Joan Mitchell Center Artist in Residence, New Orleans, July 2022
This Is Not America’s Flag, The Broad, Los Angeles, May 21 - Sep 25, 2022
“de Young Museum Acquires 42 New Works by Bay Area Artists,” KQED Arts, July 11, 2022.
Artist Talk: "Archive=FAIL" at Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Oct. 15, 2020.
"What We Can Learn From Ruth Asawa," Frieze, Oct. 2020.
The Visible Invisible, solo show at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Oct. 17, 2020—Jan. 9, 2021.
"Openings: Stephanie Syjuco," Artforum feature, Nov. 2019