Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Philippines; lives in Oakland, California) 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 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, her family emigrated to the United States when she was a child. Syjuco received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Stanford University. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been the subject of several solo museum presentations, including: Stephanie Syjuco: Blind Spot at the MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan (catalogue); Stephanie Syjuco: White Balance/Color Cast, Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Stephanie Syjuco: Double Vision, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Stephanie Syjuco: Image Trafficking, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Stephanie Syjuco: The Visible Invisible, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, Texas; and Vanishing Point (Overlay), Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland.

Syjuco’s work was featured in Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (October 20, 2023 – April 7, 2024). Her work was also included in the exhibition Don’t Forget to Call Your Mother, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2024). In June 2024 Syjuco opened a solo museum exhibition with a catalogue at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. In April 2024, Radius Books released Stephanie Syjuco: The Unruly Archive, an artist book conceptualized by Syjuco. In 2024, Catharine Clark Gallery presented a solo survey exhibition titled Dodge+Burn: a survey exhibition of work from 2004 - present. 

Her work has been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Saint Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, among others.

A long-time educator, Syjuco is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked with Silverlens Gallery since 2023, exhibited with RYAN LEE Gallery since 2013, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2008.