Stroll past BAMPFA’s front entrance on Center Street, peer into the window and you’ll catch a glimpse of an art installation made up of neatly-cut snippets of blown-up textbooks, indexes and course material.
Titled “Present Tense (Roll Call),” the 63-by-30-foot mural was developed in under a year and is intended to spark conversations about UC Berkeley’s history of student activism and what it means to live in a tense time where ethnic studies and diversity programs are increasingly under attack — a look at the tradition of Berkeley radicalism amid President Donald Trump’s “war on woke.”
The mostly black-and-white piece, accented with highlighter yellow and somewhat reminiscent of a campus bulletin board, is UC Berkeley art professor Stephanie Syjuco’s first major commission for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Syjuco, who was born in the Philippines and moved to the U.S. as a young child, was trained as a sculptor and has in more recent years established a track record of examining urgent, complex political issues including colonization and imperialism by sifting through archival records. Her work has also been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, de Young Museum and Walker Art Center, among others.
Syjuco will talk with BAMPFA curator Matthew Villar Miranda at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 16
In 2021, her multimedia exhibition “Native Resolutions” at San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery showed how archival photographs and documents have been historically used as tools of imperialism. Before that, she combed through National Museum of American History’s archives to draw attention to how objects held in institutional archives can reflect biased ideas of what is history.
Ahead of the art wall’s official unveiling on Saturday, Berkeleyside caught up with Syjuco, who lives in Oakland, by phone to learn more about her art practice and inspirations. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What were the ideas you were grappling with “Present Tense (Roll Call)”?
I’ve been looking at the history of what I’ve been calling radical pedagogy or looking at the ethnic studies library and history here at UC Berkeley. The work is really influenced by me being a professor here. Not only am I an artist, but I’m also somebody who tries to work with larger historical or cultural ideas and attempts to translate it into teaching for my students. And that kind of process of, you know, researching and reading and citing other texts and sources really came into this work, which is mostly, you know, a big display of texts.
Can you tell us more about the texts that you chose to include?
Most of the texts lean heavily on ethnic studies, but there’s also a lot of corresponding pointers to gender studies or cultural studies in general.
A lot of them actually date from the 1980s and ’90s. They’re not necessarily new. They’re sort of considered foundational, and the reason I wanted to showcase or have them in a public space is because right now teaching and learning is really under scrutiny.
And especially some of these ideas are anything having to relate to “DEI,” which is such a ridiculous thing to target as a cause of division in this country. I wanted to take up space with ideas that are considered actually foundational: Judith Butler’s Gendered Trouble, bell hooks’ text “Teaching to Transgress,” and Edward Said’s Orientalism. There’s also a duodecimal that points to a report that UC Berkeley put out on the founding of the Ethnic Studies Department in 1969.
But the work isn’t about a specific text — it’s really about a constellation of ideas. If you’re teaching and learning, you’re trying to make connections between lots of different things.
How do you feel about the current attacks on ethnic studies and DEI?
One of the most disturbing things though is this notion that some ideas can also be suppressed or come out of political favor to the point where it also winds up silencing or attacking people who find themselves in those spaces of community. The very foundation of the university is it’s supposed to be an open space of teaching and learning, and when pressure is put on it to either silence or downplay certain ideas, it’s incredibly chilling and antithetical to the job we’re supposed to do.
