WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Artist Stephanie Syjuco will be the featured speaker at the Williams College Museum of Art's annual Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art on Thursday, April 17, at 6 p.m. at the Williams Inn Ballroom. 

 

The lecture will be preceded by a reception at the Williams Inn from 5 to 6 p.m.

 

According to a press release: 

 

Stephanie Syjuco will discuss her dynamic practice spanning work in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and the excavation of archives. She has focused on how photography, in particular image-based archives, is implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of American history and citizenship. In this arena, her recent work has focused on the presence, absence, and framing of Filipinx and Filipinx-American experience in archives created by governments, the press, libraries, and communities. Syjuco subversively misuses the methods of cultural bureaucracy and categorization to reanimate the lives of images and the stories they depict. 

 

"Together with students and classes, we have been pouring over the work from Stephanie Syjuco's Block Out the Sun series that recently joined WCMA's collection through the generous support of the Plonsker Family Fund for Photography," said Pamela Franks, Class of 1956 Director. "We are eager to host her as this year's distinguished speaker for the Plonsker Lecture."

 

Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

 

A long-time educator, she is an associate professor in sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Oakland, Calif.

 

The Plonsker Family Lecture Series in Contemporary Art, established in 1994 by Madeleine Plonsker, Harvey Plonsker '61 and their son, Ted Plonsker '86, examines current issues in contemporary art. Past lecturers have included artists Arthur Jafa, Kenturah Davis, Sharon Hayes, Lynda Benglis, Cara Romero, and Jessica Stockholder.

 

The lecture is free and open to the public.