Getty and Smithsonian Museums acquire work by Stephanie Syjuco
Stephanie Syjuco, "Pileup (Herbaria)," 2021, hand-assembled pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle Baryta, edition of 3 + 2AP, 48 x 36 inches framed.
The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired four photographs by Art Practice Associate Professor Stephanie Syjuco: Pileup (Herbaria) (2021) and Applicant Photos (Migrants) #1 – 3 (2017) for its permanent collection. This marks the artist’s first major acquisition by a museum in Southern California. Selected works will be included in a forthcoming exhibition on contemporary artists responding to nineteenth- century photography.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has also acquired two works by Stephanie Syjuco. Nationalities: Eleven Filipino women in native dress and Reverse View: KKK debuted at RYAN LEE Gallery in January 2022 in Syjuco's solo exhibition, Stephanie Syjuco: Latent Images.
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. 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 American history and citizenship. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award, and a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019-20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century.