MOMA Acquires Stephanie Syjuco's Cargo Cult Series of Photographs

Stephanie Syjuco, Cargo Cult, 2018

Stephanie Syjuco’s photographic series revisits historical ethnographic studio portraiture via fictional display: using mass-manufactured goods purchased from American shopping malls and restyled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterning and costume. Purchased on credit cards and returned for full refund after the photo shoots, the cheap garments hail from the distant lands of Forever21, H&M, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Target, The Gap, and more.

Pulling from earlier projects reworking “dazzle camouflage” – a WWI technique of painting battleships with graphic black and white patterns in order to confuse enemy aim -- the disruptive outlines shift the viewer’s attention from foreground to background in an attempt to “find” the false subject. Black and white calibration charts encroach upon the pictures, and in some cases overlap and cover portions of the figure, as if insisting on their ability to "correct" the situation.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased all 7 images in the series for their permanent photographic collection after exhibiting the works in the 2018 show Being: New Photography. For more information, visit: https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/49/744.

The MOMA Database

The purchase is significant in several ways. It adds Stephanie Syjuco’s work to the permanent holdings of one of the most visible museums in the world. It also expands the holdings of MOMA in terms of gender balance and racial and ethnic diversity. MOMA maintains an open-source record of its acquisitions, and a quick analysis of the data shows how low the percentage of art made by women is, reflecting a historic gender bias in art. You can download the MOMA database here, and even retrieve Stephanie’s work.