Handmaking modernism and the commodities that accompany late capitalism is at once an homage and a critique.
Stephanie Syjuco, “Unsolicited collaborations and undercover agents: Notes from a local underground,” MFA thesis (Stanford, CA: Department of Art and Art History, 2005), 16.
Stephanie Syjuco was born in Manila, Philippines, and grew up in San Francisco. She studied sculpture at San Francisco Institute of Art, earning a BFA in 1995, and at Stanford University, where she earned her MFA in 2005. As a young artist, she recalls that “there weren’t a lot of examples of people that looked like me that made artwork,” and she became interested in “making work that sort of reflected on that marginality.”1 She developed an art practice dissecting art and fashion as elitist commodity systems that hide the realities of production. Through large-scale spectacles—like a production and sales booth of counterfeit artworks at an art fair—and free online services—like compilations of open-source designs and access to copyrighted art texts—Syjuco creates public interventions within the commerce of the art world, drawing broad attention to and public investigations into economy and empire.
Stephanie Syjuco, “In the Gallery with Stephanie Syjuco,” 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, KQED, San Francisco, 2012 (posted May 18, 2012), video by Matthew Williams and Kristin Farr, 5:19 minutes, available at youtu.be/OwTFKjU6S2c. ↩︎
At Fort Point, located at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Stephanie Syjuco set up a mock gift shop in which every object was saturated in International Orange, the iconic color of the bridge. Stocked with tchotchke souvenir items such as mugs, tote bags, keychains, and matchboxes, the shop celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge and critiqued the financial and social implications of the city’s prosperous international tourist economy. While most souvenir shops traffic in cheap, often disposable items often produced overseas by anonymous and marginalized laborers, Syjuco represented the Golden Gate Bridge with objects made by her and various local craft practitioners, like Heath Ceramics in Sausalito. Through the coproduction of artworks, she examined structures of labor and production within the cultural economy.
In 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned Stephanie Syjuco to create a new artwork, offering a budget of $35,000. With the money, she organized her first “shadowshop”—a temporary store embedded in the museum’s fifth-floor galleries that sold objects made by over two hundred artists, democratizing the artist’s invitation to show work at the museum. The shadowshop’s sales revenue—some $105,000, triple the museum’s original investment—went directly back to the artists.1 Further, the installation destabilized museum curatorial structures that typically determine whose artwork gets seen in a museum exhibition, raising questions about the status of the objects for sale as “art” or “products.”2 Syjuco drew attention to the relationship between commerce and the museum, noting that while the museum is not typically a store for art, it is a space for the display of purchased objects. As the artist explained, “it’s highlighting an existing kind of predicament, which is that art and art objects are tied into an economy and we can choose to separate ourselves from it, but that doesn’t do anything . . . so what happens when it’s just laid out for you to deal with.”3
Stephanie Syjuco, “Art / Politics / Aesthetics,” lecture at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California, April 5, 2017 (posted May 10, 2017), video, 1:08 hours, available at youtu.be/JqGxkJoZMGY. ↩︎
Tim Roseborough, “A Site of Curatorial Destabilization: Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop,” op-ed in Art Practical, May 5, 2011, available at artpractical.com/column/a_site_of_curatorial_destabilization_stephanie_syjucos_shadowshop/su/. ↩︎
Stephanie Syjuco, in “Stephanie Syjuco on the Economy of Art,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, posted December 13, 2010, 1:51 minutes, available at youtu.be/Jq7zGTrnQvU. ↩︎
On December 8, 1941, a Japanese American shop owner hung a large sign reading “I am an American” on his store window at Eighth and Franklin Streets in the Japantown neighborhood of Oakland, California. The store was forced to close as the owner and his family were ordered into concentration camps by the United States government. In March of the following year, Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) photographed the still hanging sign while working on a documentation assignment for the War Relocation Authority.1 The sign’s powerful statement on citizenship, immigration, and identity resonates today and appears in Stephanie Syjuco’s twenty-foot handmade banner I am an . . . (2017), which hangs on a moveable track so that when partially closed the word “American” is distorted. Syjuco often looks to historical protest objects—from signs and banners made by the suffragettes to the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (1985)—to examine the power of aesthetics to shape a movement. Since 2016 Syjuco has been making her own sewn banners and lends them out for use in protests. She leads banner-making workshops and disseminates her designed templates globally via a publicly accessible Google Doc—“as I’ve looked at images of protests throughout the world, I’ve seen my designs tailored and used,” said the artist, adamant that images and objects can produce social and political change.2
Dorothea Lange, Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign reading “I am an American” placed in the window of a store, at 401 - 403 Eighth and Franklin streets, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed following orders to persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. The owner, a University of California graduate, will be housed with hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration of the war, 1942. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, available atloc.gov/pictures/item/2004665381/. ↩︎
Stephanie Syjuco, “Art / Politics / Aesthetics,” lecture at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California, April 5, 2017 (posted May 10, 2017), video, 1:08 hours, available at youtu.be/JqGxkJoZMGY. ↩︎
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