de Young Museum acquires work by faculty and alumni
Stephanie Syjuco, “The Visible Invisible,” 2018. Hand-sewn chroma key backdrop fabric (cotton muslin), silk, polyester, ribbon, hand crocheted lace, commercial lace, and dress forms.
The de Young Museum in San Francisco has recently acquired the works of three UC Berkeley Art Practice members: Professor Stephanie Syjuco, Sahar Khoury (Ceramics Lecturer and MFA alum) and Miguel Arzabe (MFA alum).
“The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced on Monday an exciting expansion of its contemporary Bay Area art collection with the acquisition of 42 works by 30 emerging and mid-career artists and collectives.
Funded by a $1 million donation from the Svane Family Foundation, the additions will be featured in a 2023 exhibition at the de Young. The list of artists is a who’s who of local (and sometimes formerly local) talent: Wesaam Al-Badry, Miguel Arzabe, Saif Azzuz, Sadie Barnette, Demetri Broxton, Sydney Cain, Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Woody De Othello, Kota Ezawa, Ana Teresa Fernández, Guillermo Galindo, Katy Grannan, Angela Hennessy, Liz Hernández, David Huffman, Chris Johanson, Sahar Khoury, Koak, Christiane Lyons, Ruby Neri, Rashaad Newsome, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Postcommodity, Clare Rojas, Muzae Sesay, Daisy May Sheff, Allison Smith, Stephanie Syjuco, Rupy C. Tut, and Chelsea Wong.”
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Sahar Khoury is an artist based in Oakland, California. Khoury makes sculptures that integrate abstraction, personal and political symbols, and an intuitive sensitivity to site. Found or rejected objects that are immediate, abundant, and recurring serve as a script for constructions made of metal, clay, cement, and papier-mâché. Trained as an anthropologist and having never taken any fundamental art classes, Khoury continues to develop an idiosyncratic approach to merging diverse materials, with a primary commitment to spontaneity versus perfection. She received her BA in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and her MFA From UC Berkeley in 2013. She was the recipient of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2019 biannual SECA Art Award and the 2018 Triennial Exhibition, Bay Area Now 8 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Khoury’s work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, YBCA, Oakland Museum of California, The Wattis Institute, UC Berkeley Art Museum, Scripps 77th Ceramic Annual, Rebecca Camacho (SF) and CANADA (NY). Khoury’s work has been written about in the New Yorker, Art Review, and Hyperallergic.
Miguel Arzabe makes colorful and dynamic abstractions - weavings, paintings, videos. He starts by finding outdated beauty in paper ephemera from art shows, modernist paintings, discarded audio recordings. They are methodically analyzed, deconstructed, reverse-engineered. Drawing inspiration from the cultural techniques and motifs of his Andean heritage, Arzabe weaves the fragments together revealing uncanny intersections between form and content, the nostalgic and the hard-edged, failure and recuperation.
Arzabe lives in Oakland and is a charter studio member at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. He had recent solo shows at Shulamit Nazarian Gallery (Los Angeles, CA) and Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA). Arzabe’s work has been featured in such festivals as Hors Pistes (Centre Pompidou, Paris), Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), and the Geumgang Nature Art Biennale (Gongju, South Korea); and in museums and galleries including MAC Lyon (France), MARS Milan (Italy), RM Projects (Auckland), FIFI Projects (Mexico City), Marylhurst University (Oregon), the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, the CCA Wattis Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Arzabe’s work is held in public collections such as the Albuquerque Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the de Young Museum, and the San Francisco Arts Commission, as well as numerous private collections. He has attended many residencies including Facebook AIR, Headlands Center for the Arts, Montalvo Arts Center, and Santa Fe Art Institute. He holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS from Arizona State University, and an MFA from UC Berkeley. In 2022 Arzabe was awarded the San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award.
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.