Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist Lecture: Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco will deliver a public lecture as the fall 2021 Arthur L. and Sheila Prensky Island Press Visiting Artist. Syjuco will be in conversation with Sam Slone (MFA-VA23); a Q&A session will take place at the end.

The event is free and open to the public. In addition to in-person attendance, you can view the livestream of the talk through this link or on the Sam Fox School YouTube channel.

Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, 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 history and citizenship. For 2019/2020 she is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include Being: New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Public Knowledge at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stephanie Syjuco: Rogue States at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco earned her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, 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.