Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco, is a Filipino-born American conceptual artist and educator. She works in photography, sculpture, and installation art. Born in the Philippines, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. She lives in Oakland, California, and teaches art at the University of California, Berkeley.

Career
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.

Her early artwork explored the friction between the authentic and the counterfeit, addressing political concerns regarding issues of labor and economies within the capitalist system. In 2009 she created Copystand: An autonomous manufacturing zone for the Frieze Art Fair in London. The Wall Street Journal notes: "Other artists, meanwhile, are openly toying with the fair's changing economics... San Francisco-based artist Stephanie Syjuco and several of her artist friends are making copycat versions of their favorite fair pieces, which she is selling at "heavily discounted" prices ranging from roughly $30 to $750."

A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture in the Art Practice Department at the University of California Berkeley, having joined the department in 2013. Prior to being at Berkeley, she was a visiting lecturer at numerous art programs, including The California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, and Carnegie Mellon University. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, RYAN LEE Gallery in New York, and Silverlens Gallery, Manila. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Di rosa, The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art., among others. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in Visual Arts and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Program grant. In 2018, she was featured in the San Francisco Bay Area episode of PBS's Art21: Art in the 21st Century.

In 2011 Syjuco made Re-Edition Texts: Heart of Darkness.

In September 2019 Syjuco opened a large solo exhibition titled Rogue States at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

In 2024 Syjuco opened After/Images, a large-scale exhibit with an focus on photography and videography of Filipinos to showcase the impacts of colonialism through the framing and existence of the visual medium.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2025