Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; presenting a parasitic art counterfeiting event, COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone, for Frieze Projects, London (2009); and Shadowshop, an alternative vending outlet embedded at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, exploring the ways in which artists are navigating the production, consumption, and dissemination of their work (2010–2011). She is currently collaborating with the FLACC Workplace for Visual Artists in Genk, Belgium, on a new body of works utilizing 3-D scanning of Belgian and Congolese antiquities to produce hybrid ceramic objects addressing the legacy of colonialism, empire, and trade routes.

Born in the Philippines, she received her M.F.A. from Stanford University and B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at MoMA/P.S.1, Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, ZKM Center for Art and Technology, Germany; Z33 Space for Contemporary Art, Belgium; UniversalStudios Gallery Beijing; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; and California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops in Istanbul and in 2009 contributed proxy sculptures for the MOMA/P.S.1 joint exhibition entitled 1969. Recently, she has expanded into the curatorial field with the exhibition Lossy at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and essays by her will appear in the forthcoming Journal for Design Strategies published by Parsons The New School and within a book on alternative art education to be published by Phaidon.

A longtime educator, she has taught at Stanford University,  California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College, and Carnegie Mellon University; in January 2014 she joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as an Assistant Professor in Sculpture. At Berkeley she is working to expand a conceptual and materials-based pedagogy, combining methods of the handcrafted with digital technologies and social engagement in order to speak of the frictions within late-capitalist society. A recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, she serves on the Board of Directors at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and lives and works in San Francisco.