Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Photography, sculpture, installation, archive
Website: stephaniesyjuco.com
Stephanie Syjuco was born in 1974 in Manila, Philippines, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with her family in 1977. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1997, and received her MFA from Stanford University in 2005. She has lived and worked in Oakland throughout her career and is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 2013. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, RYAN LEE Gallery in New York, and Silverlens Gallery in New York and Manila.
Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2020), a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award (2009), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of American History, Washington DC (2019–2020). She is featured in Season 9 of the PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Her artist monograph Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive was published by Radius Books in 2024. Her work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Museum, SFMOMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the de Young Museum, among many others.
Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving between handmade and craft-inspired mediums, digital editing, and deep archival excavation. Her practice is driven by critical research into how images, objects, and archives construct and sustain racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship — and more recently, into the colonial history of the Philippines and its ongoing afterlives. Using open-source systems, shareware logic, and collaborative co-creation, her projects expose the hidden infrastructure of economies and empire: who gets to make things, who gets to own them, and whose image gets to represent history.
Her early work explored the friction between the authentic and the counterfeit — hand-crocheted replica luxury handbags, copycat artworks sold at art fairs at steep discounts — as a way of questioning the political economy of cultural production. More recently, her work has turned to the photographic archive as a site of colonial violence and resistance: intervening in museum collections, excavating shuttered newspaper archives in Manila, and using green-screen and chromakey fabric to render marginalized figures simultaneously hypervisible and erasable.
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