Stephanie SyjucoArt as Intervention

artist holding products from her red colored store and collateral
Stephanie Syjuco at the exhibition International Orange, Fort Point, San Francisco, May 25–October 28, 2012. Photo by Mike Kepka. Courtesy of Mike Kepka / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris.

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.

  1. 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. ↩︎